Posts Tagged ‘assumptions’

Get over yourselves – be as a mustard seed

October 1, 2022

Pentecost 17 – 2022
Luke 17:5-10
Marian Free

In the name of God – Source of all being, Word of Life, Holy Spirit. Amen.

Apparently the Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard said that “we need to forget all Christian language for 100 years”. It is a radical statement, but one that deserves to be taken seriously. There are so many “givens” that we now take for granted – especially when it comes to our biblical texts – that we are in danger of losing the original meaning of a text or of reading into a text what we expect to be there, rather than being open to what is actually there. Starting with a clean slate (abandoning inherited interpretations) would provide an opportunity to see our faith and our texts with fresh eyes and to glean a new – more accurate – understanding.

Today’s gospel provides one such example of the way in which we have read things into the text or used a text for our own purposes. This is because a) we approach the text from a particular viewpoint and b) because the literal translation of the Greek doesn’t immediately make sense.

The gospel this evening consists of two apparently unrelated texts – a demand for faith on the part of the disciples followed by Jesus’ example of the relationship between slaves and masters. Examining these texts anew and without the baggage of our existing understanding shows them to be closely related and makes it clear that they are less about the amount of faith one has and more about a life of faith as servants of God.

A traditional interpretation of our text is that if only we had enough faith, we could do astonishing – if extremely odd – feats. Doing the extraordinary – uprooting and re-planting mulberry trees, healing the sick or turning water into wine – has become, at least for some, a benchmark of the degree of faith that one has. Behind this is an assumption that faith is somehow quantifiable, something that we can measure, a benchmark that we should aim to reach. The implication is that it is possible to have too little faith, or that faith and the performing of miracles are intimately related.

Three things argue against this interpretation.

First is the context. The disciples’ demand to have their faith added to follows Jesus’ instruction to forgive. (Forgiveness might be miraculous, but it has nothing to do with the moving of mulberry trees.)

A second argument against the idea that Jesus’ saying has to do with the amount of faith one has is revealed by an examination of Greek text. When we do that, we discover that the translators have done what they often do – they have added words. This is because it seems to them that the original text needs additional words in order to make sense. The presumption seems to be – if the disciples have asked Jesus to add to their faith, Jesus response must be related to the size of their faith – which is what the NRSV English translation suggests. “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” The Greek however says nothing about the size of a mustard seed. A literal translation of the sentence is: “If you had faith as a mustard seed.” Our translators have replaced “as” with “the size of” probably because the idea of a mustard seed having faith presents its own difficulties!

Finally, the fact that the author of the gospel has paired Jesus’ saying about the mustard with the example of the master and slave, suggests that his intention was that we read the two sayings together. Jesus’ example is image from everyday life with which Luke’s readers would have been familiar. In the highly structured culture of the first century, each person fulfilled their assigned role with no expectation that they would be singled out for praise simply for doing what they were meant to do. This interpretation is further strengthened when our attention is drawn to another translation issue.

The final line of Jesus’ example is translated as: “So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We are worthless slaves; we have done only what we ought to have done!’” Behind this assumption is the view that slaves would be self-deprecating, or worse that the early Christians (whom we assume to be the slaves) think of themselves as having little value in God’s (the master’s) eyes. We see Jesus’ example quite differently when it is pointed out that the word translated as “worthless” is actually the negative of the word “need”. The sentence could just as easily read: “we are slaves without need.” In other words, the slaves do not need to be thanked for carrying out their role because fulfilling their role is sufficient reward.

In the light of these three points – context, translation, and pairing – it becomes clear that Jesus is not childing the disciples for their lack of faith, rather he is chastising
them for imagining that faith is a commodity – something that can be owned, measured and used. A mustard seed has no choice except to fulfill the purpose for which it was created. A slave has little choice but to do what their master requires. Jesus seems to be encouraging the disciples to be satisfied with fulfilling the purpose for which they were created and with living out their God-given vocation.

He might just as well be saying: “Get over yourselves! Faith is not something to possess but a state of being – in relationship with God and in relationship with others. Be happy with who you are. Live out your vocation faithfully. Trust God to work in and through you and get on with living.”

Jesus says: “Have faith as a mustard seed.” “Be content with the person that you were created to be.”
Our response might be: “We are slaves without need.” “We will live our lives faithfully, allowing ourselves to be used for God’s purpose rather than striving to be what we are not.”

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Opening the eyes of the blind

March 29, 2014

Lent 4

John 9:1-41

Marian Free

In the name of God who causes the blind to see and the deaf to hear. Amen.

Some of you may have seen the movie A Time to Kill. It is based on a John Gresham novel and set in the Deep South of the United States. A black man (Carl) is on trial for attempting to kill the men who raped and tortured his ten-year-old daughter Tonya. The evidence is clear and the white jury have no sympathy for the grief and rage that led the man to take justice into his hand. It becomes clear that he will be condemned and that he will receive the death penalty. His lawyer (Jake) tries to persuade him to plead guilty but Carl says to him: “If you was on that jury. What would convince you to set me free?” What follows moves and challenges me every time I think about the movie.

In his summing up, Jake takes the jury on a journey in their imagination. He describes what happened to the child – how she was abducted, raped so viciously that she would never have children, used as target practice – full beer cans thrown so hard that they tear her flesh to the bone. He tells how she was urinated on, had a noose place around her neck and hung from a tree and how when her tiny body proved too heavy for the branch, she was tossed back into the truck, driven to a bridge and thrown thirty feet into a river. “Can you see her?” he says.” “I want you to picture that little girl. Now imagine she is white.” At that point the penny drops for the jurors. At that moment, the child is no longer a stranger, no longer a member of a race for whom they have no respect. She becomes their own child – their daughter, their niece, their granddaughter. The horror of the crime and the violent grief of the father become understandable. They would have felt the same.

Of course, powerful as that is, it is fiction and it is set against a particular background. That said, it is a reminder that many of us tend to see the world in a certain way. We tend to be blinded by our experiences, by our cultures and our religious ideals. Whether we like it or not, most of us make judgements about other people. We create stereotypes that are difficult to break and make assumptions based on false or limited information. Sometimes our ideas change gradually as we get to know the person or group we have demonised. At other times we need something to shock us out of our complacency so that we can see the other for whom they are, not who we believe them to be.

Jesus is an expert at shocking people into a new way of seeing. He wants us to see things in new ways, not in the conventional, centuries old way of seeing things. He astonishes us by appearing to disregard the law, by healing on the Sabbath and by eating with tax collectors. His parables explode existing religious truths and force his hearers to reconsider their ideas about God and about other people. His teaching and behaviour are sometimes contradictory. In Luke, the story of the rich young man is followed by the account of Zaccheus. Jesus urges the rich young man to give away all his possessions then he commends Zaccheus who only gives away half of his possessions. It begs the question: What are we to do with our possessions? Jesus is not being fickle or obtuse, the contradiction and confusion have a purpose – they are designed to destablise our preconceptions, to make us dependent on God and to prevent us from believing that we can have all knowledge and all truth. If Jesus does not conform to the party line, and if his teaching is apparently then inconsistent it is impossible for anyone to claim that they fully understand or that they have a monopoly on truth.

The account of the healing of the blind man is a lesson about seeing – seeing differently. The Pharisees, who believe that they can see clearly are exposed as those who are blind whereas the blind man gradually comes to see who Jesus really is. The Pharisees who believe that they have nothing to learn are shown to be misguided and ignorant whereas the blind man who is aware how little he knows is proven to be the one who recognises the truth. The Pharisees are so locked into what they think they know that they are unable to change their preconceptions and expectations, whereas the blind man who recognises that he knows little is open to new ideas. He is aware that he has room to learn.

Throughout the story the Pharisees dig themselves into a deeper and deeper hole – demonstrating how little they really know. The blind man not only receives his sight, but allows himself to be enlightened and his ideas to be challenged. The Pharisees who represent the religious leaders, judge Jesus on outdated credentials – he is a sinner, he does not observe the Sabbath, he does not observe the law (9:16), they do not know where he comes from. The blind man uses other – also legitimate – criterion to accept that Jesus comes from God. Just as his forebears believed Moses because of the signs he performed so the blind man sees and believes in the signs that Jesus does – making the blind to see (9:16). He understands intuitively that God listens to one who worships him and obeys his will (9:31). The Pharisees believe that they give glory to God by rejecting Jesus, yet it is the blind man who gives glory to God by worshiping Jesus.

John’s gospel is written for those who will come to faith – that is ourselves. As witnesses to the drama that is unfolding, we are challenged to think about ourselves and our ability to see; to ponder whether we identify with the blind man or the Pharisees and to consider how much we know about and whether we are willing to know more. We are challenged to remain open and expectant, to allow God to reveal God’s self in ways that are unanticipated and that break apart our previous ideas as to who and what God is. We are warned against holding rigidly to preconceptions and assumptions that lock us into only way of thinking and that therefore lock us out of the truth.

The problem with believing that we know it all is that it can blind us to what is actually in front of us. confidence in what we know means that we see things from one point of view – ours. If we believe that our perspective is the only one that has a claim to truth, we are forced to protect and defend it even when the facts contradict it. The Pharisees were unable recognise Jesus because they persisted in their way of seeing things, even when Jesus’ actions seemed to put the lie to it. The blind man was not bound to one interpretation, one view of the world. He was willing to learn and to use what he did know in a different way.

Let us not be so self-assured, so confident in our way of seeing that we are blind to the presence of God or that we fail to see Jesus even when he is right in front of us.

 

 

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