Jeremiah 23:1-6

Resources

1. William Holladay, in his Hermeneia series commentary, says that Zedekiah was on the throne at the time of this prophecy. Zedekiah could be translated as "Righteous is Yahweh." Jeremiah thus closes this prophecy with a play on the king's name, suggesting that the name of the Messiah will be "Yahweh is our righteousness." Not only is the order of the two parts of the name reversed, but, perhaps more importantly, the singular becomes a plural. Yahweh is our righteousness.

Reflections and Questions

1. Does the singular and plural make a difference for the Girardian reading? Human community is based on "unanimity minus one"; it is built on the singularity of the victim. Even if that singularity is represented in the name of a king, that might be appropriate since kingship is descended from the singularity of victimhood in the sacrificial cult. As Girard says, a king is a designated sacrificial victim with an indefinitely extended sentence. So if that king cannot keep feeding other victims to the sacrificial cult, he will become the next victim (e.g., Saul, Louis XIV). Perhaps that's why it was difficult for the Israelite kings (or any conventional king) to rule as good shepherds; the system demanded that they continue feeding sheep to the sacrificial fires in order to avoid becoming one themselves. Yahweh's Messiah, then, would not only need to be a different sort of person, but he would have to do something to change the system. He would need to base human community on something different. According to John 10, Jesus the Messiah was the Good Shepherd precisely by offering himself as one of the sheep (see my sermon from Good Shepherd Sunday 2000). And the effect of that offering, says St. Paul, is that God's righteous becomes our righteousness (cf., Romans 3). The singularity of Christ's sacrifice graciously became the plurality of a new righteousness for all those who are in Christ Jesus. Jeremiah was correct, "The Lord is our righteousness."

2 Samuel 7:1-14a

Reflections and Questions

1. The RCL serial option for the First Lesson actually fits quite well with the Second Lesson. Ephesians 2 is about the walls we put up that divide us. For the most part, these "walls" are meant figuratively, but often those figurative walls lead to literal walls. This is perhaps no more dramatically the case than for the Temple -- or any of the many religious structures we build to house the Sacred.

In a 2000 trip to the Holy Land, I was struck by the literal building up and tearing down of walls at many of the sites we visited. Our guide gave us a building history that often went something like this: "This church started as one of those built by the emperor Constantine's wife, Helena, back in the third century. It was destroyed by the Muslims in the seventh century, rebuilt by Crusaders in the 12^th century, destroyed again by the Turks, and finally rebuilt in its present form in the 1920's." In the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth, for example, there were walls from the previous buildings integrated into the lower levels of the present one. Many of the walls in the Holy Land bear the marks and traces of those figurative walls we erect due to the Sacred. The last and toughest point of Mid-east peace negotiations will probably be the Temple mount itself, currently occupied by two mosques. This passage helps belie the seeming hesitance to have built a Temple in the first place! Does our history confirm the rightness of this hesitance?

2. More recent history is not a whole lot better. Our parish of Emmaus in Racine celebrates its 150^th anniversary in 2001. We think we're the oldest Danish congregation in this country. But we didn't start out as all Danish. The original name of the congregation was the First Scandinavian Lutheran Church of Racine, because it was comprised of both Danes and Norwegians. But they had a falling out in the 1870's, and the Norwegians were forced out in a court case they brought to county court which back-fired on them. That was the first of several split-offs of other congregations from Emmaus. Looking at this history 150 years hence, it is difficult to even recover, or understand, what all these church fights were about. The figurative dividing walls between Danes and Norwegians -- and then, later, even between factious groups of Danes -- helped build a history of literal church walls to house the divided communities. Always, the power of the Sacred was claimed to be on each side of the dispute. The court case in the 1870's began as a heresy trial.

3. At the moment Jesus dies on the cross, the great dividing curtain in the Temple is ripped open from top to bottom. The Sacred was exposed at the same time the physical dividing 'wall' came tumbling down.

Ephesians 2:11-22

Resources

1. James Alison has a section on Ephesians called "Redeeming the Time" in The Joy of Being Wrong, pages 229-232. It is most helpful to read the whole of chapter 8 to get the full context, but this exposition of Ephesians can also stand alone and provide some help to the interpreter.

Reflections and Questions

1. "For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us." It is the "in his flesh" part which is often left out of the discussion of this oft-quoted, key verse. But it is crucial for St. Paul who sees the dividing wall precisely in the rite of circumcision. This passage begins with: "So then, remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called "the uncircumcision" by those who are called "the circumcision" -- a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands...." Notice particularly the description of circumcision: made in the flesh by human hands. Circumcision is basically a sacrificial rite, in which just a tiny (but significant!) piece of flesh is substituted for the whole person. And as a sacrificial means for signifying membership to a community it is exclusionary. Inclusive human community can never be formed on such a basis. St. Paul won't stand for it. Rather, baptism into the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is our peace; the dividing walls of hostility built up by our usual means, "made in the flesh by human hands," are broken down by Jesus "in his flesh."

Mark 6:30-34, 53-56

Resources

1. Robert Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred, pp. 99-100:

Jesus in the Wilderness; Exodus and Creation (6:31-56)

But there is to be no rest, because the mob follows along and is soon demanding not only attention but food. Jesus and the disciples are so busy that they do not have time to eat (6:31). When the crowd follows them even to their wilderness retreat, we expect indignation on the part of Jesus, but instead “he was moved with pity for them because they were as sheep without a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things” (6:34). This shows that there is also pity in Mark’s dark vision of the mob. At the point where, in terms of the poetics of place, they have just expelled the scapegoat into the wilderness and even harried him in his place of retreat, the goat turns a pitying eye on his sheepish persecutors. They simply do not understand the source of sacred violence in themselves. In their victimization of others, they are the victims of their own self-deception through the double transference.

Then follow the miracles of the feeding of the five thousand and the walking on the water (6:35-52), which attest Jesus’ power over nature but which the disciples did not understand (6:52) because their hearts were hardened. This information is an invitation to probe deeper into the meaning of these texts, and the deeper disclosure of these miracle stories is the Exodus/creation theme established in the introduction. The feeding in the wilderness recalls the manna, and the walking on the sea recalls the passage of Israel dryshod through Red Sea waters. The way of the scapegoat is the way of Exodus and new creation.

The section ends with the by now typical scene of the crowd thronging around Jesus to be healed and blessed, the pitiful multitude that was as sheep without a shepherd (6:53-56). We have been warned, however, that the hearts of the disciples are hardened. There is much more to come that they will not understand.

3. Andrew Marr, "On Being Bread from Heaven: The Way of Mimetic Participation" (online article).

Reflections and Questions

1. I began my 1991 sermon this way:

As Jesus went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things. (Mark 6:34)

...and Jesus began to teach them....Wait a minute! Teach them? Does that follow his having compassion on the crowd? But that's what it says: Jesus had compassion on them and began to teach them. Let's try to get this straight: The fact that Jesus had compassion on the crowd would seem to say that he recognized that it was a group of hurting people in front of them. Most were poor, the product of failed leadership, sheep without a shepherd. Many probably were sick, desperately seeking the kind of miraculous healing that Jesus was rapidly becoming famous for. So with all these hurting, needy people in front of him, what was Jesus' compassionate response? Miracles of healing is what I would expect. Even uplifting, inspiring words I could see. But teaching? That's not what I'd expect.

Girardian psychology might give us a clue both to these questions and to this chapter in Mark. One of the key insights of Girardian psychology is how to understand the many ways in which we become scandalized (from the Greek skandalon). When embroiled in the entrenched rivalries of metaphysical desire, we cause one another a lot of pain. We can literally make one another sick.

I think it is this kind of hurt that Jesus came to heal: "Blessed are those who are not scandalized by me" (Mt. 11:6; Lk. 7:23). In Mark 6 we are shown scandal in the first couple episodes. The people of Nazareth are scandalized by their hometown boy, and Jesus can do no healing there. Scandal and wholeness are opposites. And, in what appears to be another non sequitur (John the Baptist's death happens earlier, so why does Mark insert it here?), we are told about the scandalous relationship between Herod and John and how it leads to the latter's sacrifice.

2. What will bring people flocking to someone? The chance to have their hurts made whole. Who do people flock to for healing today? Not to people of the church. A.A., for example, is a community of healing that makes good use of what I would consider evangelical teaching, but these folks felt forced to meet outside churches because there they only met condemnation, people who were scandalized by their illness.