Faith, Works, and Being Human: The Lectionary for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Last updated on: August 30, 2015 at 11:00 am by Eric Smith

Faith, Works, and Being Human: The Lectionary for the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost 2015-08-28T10:13:00-07:00 Eric Smith

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Jesus exorcising the Canaanite woman’s daughter, from Très Riches Hueres du Duc de Berry, a 15th century manuscript. Image from Wikipedia, in the public domain.

Proverbs 22:1-2, 8-9, 22-23 and/or Isaiah 35:4-7

What It’s About: I never quite know what to do with the various options that the lectionary gives us. That’s true for preaching, and that’s true for writing this blog. Sometimes I choose one and ignore the other, and sometimes I try to take account of both. These two passages, from Proverbs and from Isaiah, couldn’t really be more different on the surface. One is from the wisdom tradition, and it gives advice for living, including how one should treat the poor. The other text, the Isaiah, comes from the prophetic tradition, and it is looking forward to a time when the things that are wrong with the world will be righted. One takes life as it is, and offers suggestions for its living; the other imagines life as it might be, and exhorts the reader to hopefulness.

What It’s Really About: This passage from Proverbs, as it appears in the lectionary, is like Swiss cheese. It’s full of holes, where verses have been omitted or skipped over. In fact, the parts that are left out are enough to constitute a full reading themselves: Proverbs 22:3-7, 10-21. That would be an interesting project to do sometime. Someone ought to create the Reverse Lectionary, that consists only of the verses skipped by the actual lectionary. It would be full of material rated PG-13 to R, plus lots of stuff that is theologically outdated or embarrassing, weird, or boring. It would be marvelous.

Anyway, these two passages really represent two distinct biblical views. There is, of course, no one biblical viewpoint; the bible contains lots of different perspectives and even several distinct worldviews. The prophetic tradition and the wisdom tradition are two of those, and here you can see in microcosm how they differ. The prophetic tradition envisions an overturning of social order; the wisdom tradition offers advice for navigating the way things are. Both share assumptions: in this case, they both understand that wealth levies its power against poverty, and both call that wrong. But they envision different solutions to that dynamic.

What It’s Not About: It’s not about the more-radical views on economics that are embedded in the parts of Proverbs 22 that the lectionary skips (hi there, Proverbs 22:7). It’s not about the very-non-21st-century views on women that are found in 22:14, or the views on discipline found in 22:15. I’m not against skipping things like this, but I do think that there is a pretty big gap in our understanding of why we skip over things like this, and I worry that skipping them enables us to hold views of the bible that we couldn’t otherwise hold. How differently would we think about the bible if we read this stuff out loud each week? I bet we would be more critical of it–not in a criticizing sense, but in a critical inquiry sense.

Maybe You Should Think About: I think a publisher should think about giving me a book contract for a book about the Reverse Lectionary–the stuff we skip each week. It would be a commentary on all the stuff the church is afraid to read out loud. The more I think about this, the more I think it’s an amazing book idea. Maybe I’ll call it The Unlectionary: A Commentary on the Bible We Ignore.

James 2:1-17

What It’s About: You know what? The bible is really amazing. Even after years of preaching and discussing the bible, even after completing a PhD in biblical interpretation, I am still surprised nearly every time I open the book. This passage from James is a great example. These verses could have absolutely come from a 21st-century discussion of the role of church in society. Is it for the rich, or for the poor? Is there a way for it to be both? And what happens when we notice, recognize, or talk about economic difference within church communities?

What It’s Really About: The author of this text is really trying to hammer this home: all the beliefs in the world get overshadowed by actions that run counter to those beliefs.

James was one of the great battlegrounds of the Protestant Reformation, and this passage is a great example of the kind of thing reformers seized on as being bad theology. But as a Protestant, 500 year on, I’m not so sure they were right. There’s nothing here in James that I can disagree with. This section sounds like a really well-reasoned consideration of the role behavior has in the Christian life. What role does it have? It’s important! And making our behavior match our beliefs is a great way to make sure that our beliefs are truly held.

What It’s Not About: I don’t think this is a rejection of faith, or even a wholesale endorsement of works, in the way the combatants in the Protestant Reformation want it to be. I think the author wants us to think about the two in tandem, and the later dichotomy would not have made much sense to him.

Maybe You Should Think About: What sorts of situations might have led the author to write this? It’s always interesting to read the answer, and try to figure out what the question was. Why would someone provide this advice? If you can imagine what kinds of conflicts might have led to this writing, then compare those to the kinds of conflicts that go on in churches today. Where those two meet: that might be a sermon.

Mark 7:24-37

What It’s About: This story is one of the most explosive in the gospels. Jesus’ callous words in verse 27 are stunning, and the woman’s response is too. And those words change Jesus’ mind; he tells her that her daughter is healed.

Then, the next half of this lectionary text is filled with Jesus performing a healing. He readily healed the man, in contrast to the story of the Syrophoenician woman, but he did so in a really different way. The contrast between these two stories, and the fact that they are juxtaposed with each other, makes the similarities and differences stark.

What It’s Really About: In both stories there is a person with a condition: a girl with an unclean spirit and a man who was deaf and had a speech impediment. In both stories Jesus is approached: the girl’s mother seeks him out (he didn’t want to be found), and the man is brought to Jesus. But Jesus’ response is dramatically different in the two stories. Jesus calls the woman’s daughter a dog–or at least compares her to one–and she is told to go away, in so many words. Meanwhile, the man is taken away to a private place. The girl’s mother is active, advocating for her daughter, while the man is passive, at least in this telling of the story. Finally, the healing in each story is different. The girl seems to have been healed of the unclean spirit without Jesus’ help at all, and maybe even in spite of him. There is no action on Jesus’ part; he just declares that the demon is gone. As for the man, Jesus performs a number of actions with a lot of substances: put fingers into his hears, spat, touched the man’s tongue, and said words. It’s a very active, engaged healing. The contrast is confounding; one seems to assume Jesus’ power emanates from him almost unwillingly, while the other seems to cast Jesus as a folk healer, trying hands-on remedies.

What It’s Not About: I like this story, because it doesn’t attempt to make Jesus into some kind of superhero. He is clearly tired here, and he is kind of a jerk. Just like me, and just like you. We’ve all known that feeling that comes when we cannot possibly handle one more person, and then someone comes to us–someone we might not like–and asks something of us. We might be tempted to react harshly, and that’s just what Jesus did. Mark is the gospel least worried about portraying Jesus as human; here, Jesus is human through and through.

Maybe You Should Think About: Compare this version of the story of the Syrophoenician woman with the one in Matthew (15:21-28). How are they different or similar? How does Matthew change Mark’s text? Does he soften it? How and why?

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