20 Pentecost Cycle b proper 22 October 7, 2018
Job 1:1; 2:1-10 Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 Mark 10:2-16
Lectionary Link
The Hebrew Scriptures reveal the great gift of the law to the people of Israel. And what is law? I would call law the revelations of the best insights for how to live given the conditions of freedom which exist in our world.
The great Bible story begins with a totally innocent world and through the work of the serpent and human agency the knowledge of good and evil became the human experience.
Once human beings discover good and evil within the freedom of the world, what does God do to help people live together with safety and without sustaining too much harm?
God gave the law. The law arises as recommended actuarial living. When people live in the conditions of freedom, what probably will happen? How can human being live so that more probable good can happen than more probable evil? How can people in community live to create the best probable outcomes? This is where the law comes in.
Israel through Moses received the law with great and wonderful actuarial wisdom on how to live so that there is more probability of good things happening than bad things.
So, Israel, you need an identity that will keep you together as a people so that you don't fall apart as a community. How do you do that? You love one God. You don't imitate the neighboring tribes who have many gods. You keep from hypocrisy of saying you believe in one God when in practice you don't. (Don't take God's name in vain). You give God some time to build your One God identity. (Keep the sabbath). You want to add good probability to your life? Honor family relations, like parents and spouses. You honor property rights; don't steal. You honor truth; don't lie. You honor life; don't kill. And you learn impulse control; don't covet. And so there are many of laws and rules for times and places in one's life for social order. Big laws and little laws, all based on some notion of actuarial wisdom.
But if one observes the law to one's best ability, does that keep bad things from happening to anyone? There was a tradition of religious thinking that arose which said that if bad things happened to you, then you must have offended God and transgressed some law and so the resulting evil was a reciprocal punishment. Conversely, if you were blessed with luck and success that must mean you were properly observing God's law and attaining the resulting blessing.
And so we have the witness of Job; he was an religious observant man. He was faithful, helped the needy and was law abiding. He should have been the one obviously blessed to have good fortune. He was proving good probability theory. But Job was the figure in a wisdom story to challenge very narrow minded thinking about the law. The story about God who is perfect freedom, included the Satanic agency of bad things happening. No matter how religious one is or how one lives, good and bad things can happen to anyone in seeming inconsistent ways.
Why do so many of the world's tyrant get so much power and wealth while being the most dishonest and cruel people of their times? This kind of disproves the theory of only good things happening to good people.
Job is the story of bad things happening to a good man and his struggle to maintain his faith and belief in God, even while his friends victimized him and told him to admit his secret faults which had caused his bad luck.
Keeping the law is good actuarial practice; but it still does not guarantee exemption from bad things happening to anyone.
The presence of the law in the lives of people also requires an expansion of the number of laws. Why? Because people fail to keep the law and when people fail to keep the law, new laws of sentencing and punishment have to be written to deal with human failure.
Charity often fails in human relationship, in marriage and divorce happens. The reasons for permitting divorce was a big theological question among the rabbis in the time of Jesus. Jesus was upset with the emphasis that religious leader expressed. Just because people fail at charity, the failure at charity and divorce cannot overturn the standard of marriage as being the norm.
Jesus was saying just because people fail at charity, such failure cannot be stated as the norm. Marriage is the still the law, even if people fail a marriage. Jesus was not denying the fact that divorce occurred in the lives of people, he was upset that the religious leaders began to treat divorce as being a legal principle which challenged the primacy of marriage. The law of marriage remains the same no matter how much people fail and petition for divorce.
Jesus confronted people who were burdened with legalistic lives. Some people thought they were blessed because they were members of the correct religious party. Others were so concerned with failure to keep the law, that they began to treat failure as the norm.
Jesus was fed up with adult religious life of religious leaders which had become legal arguments between religious parties about who believed in the right way.
What did he do? He brought a child and rebuked the adult religious cynics. "See this child...this child is innocent...this child lives beyond good and evil of adult religious legalism. You want to understand God's kingdom, access your child aspect of personality, the part of you that still retains original blessing and original innocence. With the energy of your inner child you can be restored in the new birth that you need to understand God in the adult world so bogged down within the knowledge of good and evil and their effects upon us."
What have we learned from Holy Scriptures today?
No matter how religious we are, we are not exempt from the free conditions that can happen to anyone. So let us not get bogged down in claiming such an exemption. Don't presume to know why bad things happen to us or anyone else. We may victimize them instead of simply offering our assistance and care.
Next, just because it is common to people to fail to keep the law, the norm and ideal still remain the same. Human failure at marriage does not change the normalcy of marriage and enduring love in personal commitment to each other.
Finally, is the world of the knowledge of good and evil making you cynical and angry and unable to love. Is the knowledge of good and evil making us misanthropic, leaning toward disillusionment with humanity? Look to project upon the infant and the child and recover the power of innocence within oneself to know the power of a new birth. The power of innocence can help us survive living with the free conditions of knowing good and evil. With the power of innocence, we can overcome the anxiety of the adult world of living with the knowledge of good and evil.
Let each of us find the new birth of the child within us to counter the effects of living with the knowledge of good and evil. Amen.
The Hebrew Scriptures reveal the great gift of the law to the people of Israel. And what is law? I would call law the revelations of the best insights for how to live given the conditions of freedom which exist in our world.
The great Bible story begins with a totally innocent world and through the work of the serpent and human agency the knowledge of good and evil became the human experience.
Once human beings discover good and evil within the freedom of the world, what does God do to help people live together with safety and without sustaining too much harm?
God gave the law. The law arises as recommended actuarial living. When people live in the conditions of freedom, what probably will happen? How can human being live so that more probable good can happen than more probable evil? How can people in community live to create the best probable outcomes? This is where the law comes in.
Israel through Moses received the law with great and wonderful actuarial wisdom on how to live so that there is more probability of good things happening than bad things.
So, Israel, you need an identity that will keep you together as a people so that you don't fall apart as a community. How do you do that? You love one God. You don't imitate the neighboring tribes who have many gods. You keep from hypocrisy of saying you believe in one God when in practice you don't. (Don't take God's name in vain). You give God some time to build your One God identity. (Keep the sabbath). You want to add good probability to your life? Honor family relations, like parents and spouses. You honor property rights; don't steal. You honor truth; don't lie. You honor life; don't kill. And you learn impulse control; don't covet. And so there are many of laws and rules for times and places in one's life for social order. Big laws and little laws, all based on some notion of actuarial wisdom.
But if one observes the law to one's best ability, does that keep bad things from happening to anyone? There was a tradition of religious thinking that arose which said that if bad things happened to you, then you must have offended God and transgressed some law and so the resulting evil was a reciprocal punishment. Conversely, if you were blessed with luck and success that must mean you were properly observing God's law and attaining the resulting blessing.
And so we have the witness of Job; he was an religious observant man. He was faithful, helped the needy and was law abiding. He should have been the one obviously blessed to have good fortune. He was proving good probability theory. But Job was the figure in a wisdom story to challenge very narrow minded thinking about the law. The story about God who is perfect freedom, included the Satanic agency of bad things happening. No matter how religious one is or how one lives, good and bad things can happen to anyone in seeming inconsistent ways.
Why do so many of the world's tyrant get so much power and wealth while being the most dishonest and cruel people of their times? This kind of disproves the theory of only good things happening to good people.
Job is the story of bad things happening to a good man and his struggle to maintain his faith and belief in God, even while his friends victimized him and told him to admit his secret faults which had caused his bad luck.
Keeping the law is good actuarial practice; but it still does not guarantee exemption from bad things happening to anyone.
The presence of the law in the lives of people also requires an expansion of the number of laws. Why? Because people fail to keep the law and when people fail to keep the law, new laws of sentencing and punishment have to be written to deal with human failure.
Charity often fails in human relationship, in marriage and divorce happens. The reasons for permitting divorce was a big theological question among the rabbis in the time of Jesus. Jesus was upset with the emphasis that religious leader expressed. Just because people fail at charity, the failure at charity and divorce cannot overturn the standard of marriage as being the norm.
Jesus was saying just because people fail at charity, such failure cannot be stated as the norm. Marriage is the still the law, even if people fail a marriage. Jesus was not denying the fact that divorce occurred in the lives of people, he was upset that the religious leaders began to treat divorce as being a legal principle which challenged the primacy of marriage. The law of marriage remains the same no matter how much people fail and petition for divorce.
Jesus confronted people who were burdened with legalistic lives. Some people thought they were blessed because they were members of the correct religious party. Others were so concerned with failure to keep the law, that they began to treat failure as the norm.
Jesus was fed up with adult religious life of religious leaders which had become legal arguments between religious parties about who believed in the right way.
What did he do? He brought a child and rebuked the adult religious cynics. "See this child...this child is innocent...this child lives beyond good and evil of adult religious legalism. You want to understand God's kingdom, access your child aspect of personality, the part of you that still retains original blessing and original innocence. With the energy of your inner child you can be restored in the new birth that you need to understand God in the adult world so bogged down within the knowledge of good and evil and their effects upon us."
What have we learned from Holy Scriptures today?
No matter how religious we are, we are not exempt from the free conditions that can happen to anyone. So let us not get bogged down in claiming such an exemption. Don't presume to know why bad things happen to us or anyone else. We may victimize them instead of simply offering our assistance and care.
Next, just because it is common to people to fail to keep the law, the norm and ideal still remain the same. Human failure at marriage does not change the normalcy of marriage and enduring love in personal commitment to each other.
Finally, is the world of the knowledge of good and evil making you cynical and angry and unable to love. Is the knowledge of good and evil making us misanthropic, leaning toward disillusionment with humanity? Look to project upon the infant and the child and recover the power of innocence within oneself to know the power of a new birth. The power of innocence can help us survive living with the free conditions of knowing good and evil. With the power of innocence, we can overcome the anxiety of the adult world of living with the knowledge of good and evil.
Let each of us find the new birth of the child within us to counter the effects of living with the knowledge of good and evil. Amen.
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