Proper 19 (September 11-17)
Texts: James 3:1-12;
Mark 8:27-38; Isa 50:4-9a
DANGEROUS SPEECH: HELL, SATAN, AND POLITICS OF DIVISION
So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. – James 3:5-6
Wow! That seems extreme, doesn’t it? To imply that hell is the source for the fires our tongues can set ablaze? But there’s another extreme statement in our readings today. Jesus’ response to Peter when he doesn’t understand what it means to be the Messiah. Jesus prophesies the cross and resurrection and Peter pulls Jesus aside to “rebuke” him. Jesus “rebukes” Peter right back, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Mark 8:33). Wow! Satan!? Isn’t that a bit extreme, too? James claims that the source of our fiery tongues is hell, and Jesus calls his top disciple Satan. Which extreme should we begin with?
The Valley of Ben Hinnom, “Gehenna,” today.
Let’s start with hell — “for the hell of it,” shall we? James uses the same word as Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount (and several other places1) that we translate as “hell.” It’s the Greek word Gehenna, which itself is a rendering of the Hebrew words Ben Hinnom. And it’s decidedly not the place of eternal punishment we call “hell.” Why? Because Ben Hinnom is simply the name of a valley outside Jerusalem. In your Sermon Notes, you can see a photo of what it looks like today. Not so bad, right? For why it might be a place of such negative connotation, you have to go back in time. In Jesus’ time, it is purported to have been the city’s trash dump, with constantly smoldering fires. But to get the full significance of Ben Hinnom as a hellish place, we should go back 700 years or more to the time of the prophet Jeremiah, who rails against what happened in the Valley of Ben Hinnom three times: he calls it a place of child sacrifice to the Canaanite god Molech.
Child sacrifice. That ancient practice which is incomprehensible to us today. . . . Unless we say something like Auschwitz . . . another name of a place where children, as well as another million innocent people, were burned to death in ovens. Or, more uncomfortable to us, since we unleashed it, Hiroshima. This is the kind of place that I believe James and Jesus want us to think about. Not an otherworldly place where God punishes people for an eternity. No, Ben Hinnom, Auschwitz, Hiroshima are places in human history, where innocent people suffered the consequences of our politics of division. They’re places where we carry out political violence against other human beings whom we have demonized.
Demonized. Now, that brings us to that second extreme, Satan. In the Bible, Satan is a name borrowed from a nearby culture, which names a role in society, the Accuser. “Satan,” means the Accuser.2 What does the Accuser so often do in our societies? Demonize the opponent, right? When we accuse those we want to attack throughout our human history — it almost seems to be a “cycle of nature,” as James calls it — we have to dehumanize them. Make them seem less than human. “Vermin, dogs.” Then we can justify whatever we want to do with them. In the Bible, accusing others in dehumanizing ways is named Satan.
So why, in heaven’s name, would Jesus attach to Peter the name “Satan”? Let’s think about it for a moment. Peter has just correctly named Jesus as the “Messiah.” Jesus has just taken Peter and the other disciples on a lengthy excursion to Caesarea Philippi, the capital city of their region. It would be like me taking us on a trip to Madison or Washington, D.C. In other words, this excursion is most likely to be political in nature, right? Sure enough, Jesus asks who people are saying he is, fishing for the right political answer. Which Peter eventually provides: “You are the Messiah.” God’s chosen one, the king, our leader. Jesus immediately launches into a prophecy of what that means. As Messiah, he teaches them “that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again” (Mark 8:31). What?! That’s what our political leader is all about? Peter is no doubt shocked. He pulls Jesus aside and probably says something like,
“Jesus, the Messiah isn’t about being killed by one’s enemies. The Messiah is about killing one’s enemies. We need to get those scumbag Romans, and their Jewish collaborators, out of this land which God promised to us. They’re dogs who don’t think twice about imprisoning us, torturing us, crucifying us. As Messiah, you’re supposed to help us get rid of those pieces of excrement. Not be killed by them.”
What do you think? If Peter’s rebuke to Jesus was something like that, can you see why Jesus named Peter as Satan? The Accuser? The one who dehumanizes the enemy so that we can feel justified in killing them?
At the beginning of the summer, June 9 to be exact (Proper 5B), we read the first “parable” in Mark’s Gospel. Jesus has been casting demons out of people — no doubt healing the damage of others who had been trying to demonize them. The scribes from Jerusalem accuse Jesus: “He has Beelzebul,” they say, “and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons” (Mark 3:22). In other words, they play the Satanic game of trying to dehumanize Jesus as being in league with the ruler of the demons. What is Jesus’ parabolic response to them? This:
“How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered. (Mark 3:23-27)
At the end of this parable, Jesus has given us another name for Satan, the “strong man.” In short, the typical authoritarian leader throughout human history who comes to lead us in what Jesus also names as the politics of division. ‘A house constantly divided against itself cannot stand.’ The politics of division are the politics of demonizing the enemy so that we can feel justified in killing them. You call your enemies Satanic as a prelude to casting them out. You actually see this as what God wants you to do. Perhaps you name this Satanic strong man as “Messiah,” God’s chosen, but Jesus is trying to help us to see and understand once and for all, that this is human thinking, not divine thinking. It’s not God’s Messiah casting out Satan. It’s Satan casting out Satan. And so the house of the true God’s family remains forever divided.
Peter is still trapped in that human thinking, so he sees the Messiah in terms of that age-old strong man who dehumanizes the enemy in order to cast them out. Jesus is seeking to divest him of that thinking, to teach him God’s true Messiah can only suffer the violence, never inflict it. Peter will not be able to see and understand this until Jesus is actually raised from the dead, as proof vindicating Jesus’ version of the Messiah. (At which time the Apostles will latch hold of the Suffering Servant songs like the one in today’s First Reading.) Jesus comes to confront the age-old violent politics of division. But, obviously, he can’t himself use violence to do so. Instead, he must suffer the violence in order to expose it. And in the politics of the Risen Messiah, the politics of forgiveness and grace, the process of healing our politics of division begins. And we are called to continue to live those politics of healing the divided house of humanity.
So “hell” names places in human history where people have become victims of human politics of division. And “Satan” names those politics of division as descending from inflammatory words of accusation which demonize an enemy. In short, hell and Satan are connected through our human tongues making dangerous speech. There’s actually a very helpful website called dangerousspeech.org, where they define “dangerous speech” as, “Any form of expression (e.g. speech, text, or images) that can increase the risk that its audience will condone or commit violence against members of another group.”3 That’s what we’ve been talking about today! And the number one example used on this website is Hitler’s anti-Semitic language that led to fires of Auschwitz.
But I’d like to end this morning with an example just this week of dangerous speech that may be blossom into the fires of political violence. I’m talking about the lies told about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, OH, who supposedly are eating pets . . . cats and dogs. First of all, do you see how dehumanizing this is? And it’s led to what? Potential political violence. Bomb threats to schools and other public places. We’ve been learning in recent days that the lies may have been started by a Neo-Nazi hate group called the Blood Tribe.4
But I’d like to end this morning not so much with this grim reality of revived hate speech in our politics, but with our call to live another politics. I’d like to end with an example of us followers of Jesus seeking to bring a different kind of healing politics, a politics of love and forgiveness. It just so happens that singer/song-writer John Legend was born and raised in Springfield, OH, known back then as John R Stevens. This week he offered a five-minute video, giving a nuanced explanation of the situation of the Haitian immigrant community in his hometown. He ends it by claiming his Christian calling, saying this,
“How about we love one another? I grew up in the Christian tradition. We said to love our neighbor as ourselves, and to treat strangers as though they might be Christ. So how about we adopt that ethos when we talk about immigrants moving to our communities, and don’t spread hateful, xenophobic, racist lies about them. John R Stevens from Springfield signing off.”5
Amen, John R Stevens, Amen. May we also claim our Christian calling in standing against this kind of dangerous speech in these troubled times. Let us stand for Jesus’ politics of love and forgiveness, which can finally heal us. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, September 15, 2024
The handed-out Sermon Notes.
Notes
1. The verses in the New Testament in which “Gehenna” is behind the word “hell” are: Matthew 5:22, 29f; 10:28; 18:9; 23:15, 33; Mark 9:43, 45, 47; Luke 12:5; James 3:6.
2. “Satan” is never actually translated as the Accuser in the New Testament, but Revelation 12:9-10 shows the linkage: “The great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world — he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, proclaiming, ‘Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Messiah, for the accuser of our comrades has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.’”
3. https://dangerousspeech.org/. The definition is on multiple places across the site. Here’s a page that directly addresses the definition: https://dangerousspeech.org/about-dangerous-speech/
4. See, for example, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/trump-neo-nazis-pushed-false-claims-haitians-part-hate-campaign-rcna170796
5. See a YouTube version: https://youtu.be/24L7IhrvYFc?si=jKdrL7Eoa7I2C59U
