Reconciled Notions of the Messiah

16 Pentecost Proper19  September 13, 2015

Proverbs 1:20-33 Psalm 116:1-8

James 3:1-12  Mark 8:27-38
Lectionary Link
Do you subscribe to the denial cliche "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me?"  Or more realistically, "Sticks and stones may break my bones and words can often hurt me?"

One of the habits of the human use of language is to personify almost everything.  We personify most of our body parts....my eyes see...my ears hear...my tummy hurts.  We do this in part to try to refer to the involuntary function of a body part over which we do not seem to have a choice.  And when things  happen to and through a body part over which we don't have a choice or control then we ascribe to them a freedom and the more freedom they seem to have, the more personality they seem to have.

I do not want my tummy to ache, but it does so against my will and so it seems to have an independent freedom and therefore more personality.

The writer of the epistle of James wants to assign some major freedom to the small little muscle known as the tongue.  The writer seems to assume that the tongue is not just a major speech organ but it is an organ which apparently has a "mind of its own."    Apparently the tongue can be completely out of control.  The body is the location of the Self and the Self is a corporation body parts and members.  All of the parts are going through the involuntary aging process, each with its own aging code and each with a certain random vulnerability to environmental exposure, things like bacteria, germs and viruses.

Why would the writer of James ascribe such independent and personal power to the flopping muscle in our mouths, the tongue?  Really, that flopping muscle cannot be seen as independent from the greater Self or the One with the function of volition to make choices about the use of the tongue in conjunction with the throat, larynx and without participation in the entire word formation universe of language and words themselves.

Is the issue really about the independence of the tongue or is the issue really about personal control in the use of our words?

One could say that life is all about the control of our words and language.  The world of words and language is larger than speech acts, hearing acts or writing acts; word and language encompasses the body language in that everything that we do is actually coded by the structure of language in our lives.  We live and move and have our being in Word and in language and because this is so, it makes the particular occasion of articulation of language in speech acts to have greater prominence because a speech act can be productive and creative for better community or it can wreak havoc with verbal missiles which can destroy relationships and community.

I would like to expand the notions of James writing about the speech acts of the tongue to the notion of the overall performance of words and language in our speaking, writing, hearing and in the body language acts of our moral and ethical behaviors.

Following the writer of the Proverbs, I would propose that the best way to articulate word and language in our lives would be called the life of wisdom.  The belle lettres schools of rhetoric named one the goal of rhetoric to be "propriety."  Propriety is the saying of the appropriate thing to fit each specific occasion.  Of course, agreement about what is appropriate is always the issue; dad thinks that Johnny needs a rebuke and mom thinks Johnny needs praise.  So who determines what is appropriate and when and isn't that always the censorship question when it comes to language use?

The wisdom standard of propriety for the Christian faith might be governed by the great law, to love God with all of our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves.  And each of us is given the task given our current state of knowledge and awareness to work to organize our worded lives towards articulations of words and deeds which are appropriate to each of our life situations.

One of the wisdom questions of the early church concerned the question of the identity and the function of the idealized figure known as the messiah.  The early churches in their first days of gathering came to be divided between those with Jewish background and those with Gentile backgrounds.  The early followers of Jesus had inherited various notions about the messiah.   There were some with messianic expectations who expected a heroic figure to come and liberate Palestine.  This of course did not happen in life and ministry of Jesus, so the people who had this image of a military and political liberator as their ideal messiah did not find that Jesus measured up to this image.

The Gospel writers in the confession of Peter and the rebuke of him by Jesus are using the narrative of the life of Jesus to highlight this disagreement within the early  church about the nature of the messiah.

When Jesus taught his disciples about a messiah who suffers and dies and rises again, Peter became the teaching example of all of those who could not accept the messiah as a suffering servant.  Why would I say that it  is a teaching narrative of the early preachers in the church?  The disciples in the time of Jesus would not have understood the symbolism of "taking up of one's cross."  Taking up of one's cross became within the church a phrase which referred to a spiritual method and practice.  The death and resurrection of Christ were used as events of power within the souls of people as the death of Jesus was seen as a power to help a person conceive of ending the power of sin in one's life.  The resurrection of Christ was seen as the positive energy of the Spirit of God.  The Spirit of God gave a person the power of transformation.  Christ as the great liberator was not one to lead army; Christ was to convert people one by one in the privacy of their inner lives through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Transformation was happening as people were losing their old soul lives and receiving newly born selves with power to perform new  deeds.  This was the sublimation of energy once used for idolatry and addiction, and now transformed as the ability to perform new deeds and new words.

So how did the church reconcile the two notions of the messiah, the triumphant messiah and the suffering messiah?   The early Christians believed that the messiah had to suffer and in the death of Jesus there was provided a power for believers to die to what is unworthy within us.  The early Christians believed that the resurrection appearances of Christ were evidence of his kingly nature and power.  At the same time, they also proclaimed a future return of Christ as a king who would rule and reign in justice.  One can see how the need to reconcile the two notions of the messiah meant that many in the early church believed that this would happen in their own time.  They hoped that this dual notion of the messiah would be proved by the imminent return of Jesus.

We have inherited the images of both notions of the messiah.  Both are present within our Eucharistic liturgy.   But a more functional notion of the messiah for us is to be able always to visualize the ascendancy of justice for everyone, even when don't see it happening.  We need to visualize an intervening finality about events of justice as a way of asserting the ascendancy of justice.  We like endings in stories where the good guys win because we have hope for their being heroes who will assert the conditions of justice into our life stories even though we know that pure and direct intervention is never complete or perfect.

So what is the wisdom of the messiah for us, the one who suffered and died and rose again?  We need the power of a sublime story to be a personally experienced power of transformation in our lives.  We need to have the heroic happen in our interior lives to complete repentance by continual dying to imperfect states of our minds and souls and behaviors.  We need to know interior Higher Power to take on new states of mind towards thinking, saying, doing the new appropriate deeds and speaking of the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.

The early Christians knew that the tongue and other members of one's body could seem to have minds of their own and in face of the habits which made people feel enslaved, there needed to be a spiritual method of transformation.  And so Christian hitched themselves to the power of the Passion of Christ and of his resurrection to break the power of old habits and come into the freedom of new life expression.  The Gospel story encodes this wonderful transformation process which characterized the habits of a very successful and growing fellowship in the first century.  The Gospel relate that the secret of the kingdom of God is that it is a secret interior world within us causing  transformation and change at the heart of word center of our lives.  The kingdom of God then does not become visible with armies and weapon; it become visible with deeds and words of our lives articulated in ways appropriate to each situation.

We today know too that we need the wisdom process in our lives to find tactics and strategies of transformation so that we can come to the freedom of self control.  And maybe we will be able to learn to tame the tongue, which often seems to have a mind of its own.   And maybe God will grant us the transforming grace to bring through deed by deed, and word by word, the interior peace of God to our external worlds.   Amen.