“The
fear of the Lord,” says today’s Psalm, “is the beginning of wisdom.” But some of us might disagree. Sure, wisdom might have something to do with
God. Seeking God, perhaps, or loving
God, or knowing God—these we might accept as starting points for wisdom. But fear?
We like to think that God is loving and good, compassionate and generous
and forgiving, and indeed the Psalm describes a God like that. So what is there to fear?
It’s
a good question, and I think that to find the answer we have to look at what
“wisdom” is. Because wisdom, if it
really is wisdom, is not abstract or theoretical. It is always applied. Wisdom teaches us how to live, how to find
our way through the real world, with skill, equanimity, and grace. But if we’re going to be honest I think we
have to admit that we find the real world to be a fearful place. We might reject the notion that God is
someone to fear, but that doesn’t mean we are not afraid.
The
truth is we live in a world haunted by fear.
News about the economy, just to take one example, is full of fearful
language. Wall Street has “jitters,” we
read, or the Federal Reserve seeks to “calm investors’ fears.” Sometimes it even has to intervene to stave
off a full-blown “panic.” On a more
personal level, my wife is fond of reminiscing about her childhood and how she
and the neighborhood kids would play together outside, in and out of each
others’ houses, and up and down and around the block until they were all called
home to dinner. But in our neighborhood today,
though we know there are children because we catch fleeting glimpses of them
from time to time, they are not out playing in the street. And if they were, we wouldn’t let our
daughter join them, at least not without adult supervision. “Times have changed,” we say, but what
exactly it is that has changed is hard to put your finger on, except that we
are more afraid than our parents were.
We
are afraid of things that we do not understand and cannot control, but that gives them power over
us. It doesn’t really matter if the
Ebola virus, or Islamist extremists, or home invasion robbers pose a real
threat to our lives—the fear of them is enough—enough to make us do things we
wouldn’t otherwise do, or to not do what we otherwise would. The fear is enough to curtail our freedom and
destroy peace.
It
is when we consider this intersection of fear and power that I think we start
to understand what the psalm is saying about wisdom. Because the point is not that the God of
Israel is a terrifying God, though he certainly can be when he means to, but
that wisdom begins when we understand that in this world only God is to be
feared, because only God has ultimate power.
We who do not fear God, and reject the very idea of fearing God, no
longer believe in the power of God. We
might believe in a God who makes us feel better. That is why we have such a need to for a “nice”
God—but we don’t believe in a God with the power to save us from the things we
most fear.
In
the Gospel of Mark, Jesus begins his ministry by walking into the synagogue at
Capernaum on the Sabbath day with his four brand new disciples and beginning to
teach. Compared to the other gospels, Mark says very
little about the content of his teaching.
He does summarize it right before today’s lesson, when he says,
“Jesus came to
Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled,
and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.””
That’s
quite a message, but in the scene in the synagogue what is most important is
the impact that the message has on Jesus’ audience. They are astonished by its originality and
by its power. He speaks with authority,
but it’s not the authority of being able to skillfully back up his arguments
with quotations from scripture, which is what they are used to. His teaching seems to come straight from the
source of wisdom and truth.
Cynthia
Bourgeault, whose book The Wisdom Jesus some
folks at St. John’s are reading right now, speaks of the experience of hearing
Jesus as a “recognition event.” That is,
his teaching isn’t about some religious beliefs or moral principles that exist
“out there,” where you can hold them at arm’s length and turn them this way and
that and decide what you think of them. But
it impacts people “in here,” in their own spiritual center, which stirs and comes
alive, as if responding to a mother tongue once known but long-forgotten. It is an experience of hearing the truth
about oneself and about God, and recognizing what has always been known in the
heart.
But
the Gospel tells us there was one man in the synagogue that day whose spiritual
center was not his own. And while the
others are moved by Jesus’ preaching, the spirit that has taken possession of
this man recognizes Jesus’ person. It
sees who he really is. It understands
that his authority is not just a function of rhetorical genius or brilliance of
insight, but of the identity and purpose given to him by God. Jesus is on a mission, and his teaching is
only one aspect of it; a mission to manifest the Kingdom of God, not only as a
nice idea, but with power. That kingdom is
not going to come without a fight, and immediately, right from the start, the
real enemies of God come out to do battle.
I
think it helps to understand what is at stake in this conflict if we consider
why the Gospel refers to this antagonistic spirit as “unclean.” In the Bible “clean” and “unclean,” are very
important ideas, that do not mean what we might suppose. They are not categories that pertain to
hygiene, or to morality, but to religious worship. They have to do with the way the ancient
Hebrews perceived the world, and structured society, and lived their lives, so
as to preserve the central place in all of it for God.
And
when they said that something was unclean it was not because they believed that
it was hated by God, or outside of God. God created everything that is, and pronounced
that it is good. But there are in our
world objects and experiences that carry with them an intrinsic fascination and
danger, things like blood, like the sleep and the death of the body, things like
sex and childbirth.
To
the ancient Hebrew way of thinking, these things were unclean, not because they
are “dirty” in some puritanical sense, but because they are powerful. Someone or something that has been in contact
with them needs to be made clean, to be purified by a religious act, to bring
the numinous power of that contact back into its proper relationship with other things. It needs to be realigned with the ordered
world created by with God.
And
this was true not only of natural phenomena, and material things, but also of
the spiritual world. The Jews of Jesus’
time had a vivid sense of a world full of spirits, of unseen intelligences. But some of these spirits refused their
ordered place among the creatures of God.
Instead of worshiping before the heavenly throne, they preyed on human
beings. They fed on our fear, on our fascination
with idols, with divination, sorcery, and human sacrifice, all our efforts to
bend divine power to our control. They
sought to rival the angels, as if their power to dominate, to inflict insanity
and sickness, to take possession of a person’s soul, were on a par with God’s
power to heal, to bless, to give and preserve life.
Some
people might say that modern materialistic science has made these ideas
obsolete and irrelevant. But what is at
stake in Jesus’ conflict with the unclean spirit is not whether or not we
believe in demons. What is at stake is
whether we believe there is anything more powerful than God. Or let me put it a different way—of what in
the world are you most afraid? To what in the world
do you turn to master the things that you fear?
How we answer those questions shows us where we still need to repent,
and believe in the good news of God’s Kingdom.
It shows us where we still need Jesus to come in power.
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