Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
My direct ancestors, as far as I can tell, have been relatively lucky when it comes to sickness and death. That is not to say that we don’t get sick and we don’t die. But it is to say that when we get ready to die, we do so fairly quickly. There aren’t too many long lingering illnesses that take years and hundreds of thousands of dollars of saved up money to deal with. We usually go for heart attacks.
There are a few notable exceptions. My sister had cancer and lived with it nobly. She was out in public, doing what she wanted, as long as she possibly could. But an aunt of mine was the family exception. In 1970, catastrophe struck her. One day she was eating a sandwich when she had a stroke. It left her right arm and leg useless and her speech slurred. No longer did she take her nieces and nephews shopping. No longer did she go on dates. No longer could she deftly manage heavy doors and curbs. The world was designed for the healthy, not for those with limitations. She may have lost some of her physical ability, but she stubbornly held on to her pride. She never went to church again, after years of going weekly. It wouldn't be right to be seen struggling to walk, she thought. She kept the living room window blinds drawn so that people would not see her struggle. She tried to hide her condition from the neighbors and perhaps even from herself. She felt incomplete without arms and legs that worked perfectly. She died twenty years later, a much-saddened woman.
The bad news of the world is that it indeed seems to have no place for those with limitations or who are seen as different. In today’s gospel Jesus gives an answer to that bad news, to anyone who feels incomplete from bodily affliction, but he is speaking of far more than bodily imperfections. He is addressing everyone who does not quite meet the world's standards, and he is just as importantly addressing those among us who think we do. He is giving us a radically new vision of what it means to be complete and whole in eyes of God.
Jesus' frightening talk of cutting off hands and plucking out eyes needs unpacking for modern ears. To understand the full impact of what Jesus said, we must remember what imperfections meant to his Jewish audience. For faithful Jews of the day, bodily wholeness and perfection counted for something before God. For example, blemished animals and physically incomplete persons could not be a part of the temple sacrificial system because they were not whole. For documentation, go home this afternoon and read the book of Leviticus. In the tradition of that age, perfection, including physical perfection, was linked to divine blessing. Then Jesus comes along, upsetting received wisdom.
We modern listeners are shocked by his admonition that hands and feet and eyes are to be tossed aside like so many newly useless artificial limbs and eyeglasses at a healing shrine, and we wonder where the wisdom is in such a statement. But we fail to hear what truly shocked his contemporaries: the idea that those who cannot walk or hold on to something or see, as imperfect as they might be in the eyes of the righteous, are examples of those who will enter the kingdom of God. Divine blessing comes to those who are not acceptable, who have been told in the past, “Too bad you don't fit in.”
Just as frightening for the eligious listener of his day was the warning that the supposedly whole person could end up being thrown into hell, or in the Greek, into Gehenna. Gehenna was the name of the garbage dump outside the walls of Jerusalem. It was there that child sacrifice had taken place in one of the darker periods of Jewish history, and it was there in Jesus' day that the refuse of daily life was thrown. As is the case with any landfill, it was no place for a good person to be, especially a person from a religion that put so much emphasis on avoiding contact with anything unclean. Jesus shocked people when he said that one could have the outward appearance of completeness and end up in hell.
Only God has the wisdom to sort out what ultimately reflects truth. And God has said that we will receive a reward even though we may not deserve it by the standards of the world. It is what we call grace. You see, there will come a day, perhaps even today after having eaten at this table, when we will walk away realizing that we are not quite as perfect as we once thought we were. Each of us is going to realize that, like everyone else, we have fallen short of the person we have been called to be. But that fact does not trump God’s grace.
Jesus asks us, “So what?” to the charge that we or anyone else is not the person we think all of us should be. We can enter the kingdom anyway. The kingdom doesn't have barriers and heavy doors and high curbs that only the select can navigate around. The kingdom of God is about how every limitation is set aside. In fact, if we open our eyes with anything approaching the wisdom of God, we will see the kingdom filled right now with stumbling, broken-hearted, half-blinded people, doubters, skeptics, convicts and all, and we among them. It isn't a pretty sight, but it is a cause for joy to see the those who can’t walk well limp in, those who are blind tentatively feel their way into the kingdom, the saddened and embittered finally beginning to feel at peace.
In a moment of pure grace no one will be worried about what looks right. Don’t forget the following: Today as we baptize, we have no idea how these people’s lives will be turn out. I bet there will be some dreadful times, some broken lives. But they are marked as Christ’ own forever, as sure a sign of grace as anything I know. Our own defects only show forth God's love and wisdom in being able to take the least and the broken and proclaim acceptance through that very brokenness. Sort of like Jesus broken on a cross. In a moment of liberation, in a moment of godly wisdom, we will know what it is like to live as children of God, defects and all.
And having discovered it for ourselves, our joy will not be complete until we find another person, perhaps like that aunt of mine, hiding in her or his house with the blinds drawn, full of shame that he or she is not good enough, and we help that person limp out into the sunshine, showing that it is possible to be simultaneously incomplete and loved. It is as much as any Christian who is honest with himself can ask for. Amen.
The Rt. Rev. Larry Benfield
Bishop of The Diocese of Arkansas
