For all who
are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. When we cry, “Abba! Father!”
it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of
God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—if,
in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.
I couldn’t
help but think of these words from Paul’s letter to the Romans after reading
our Gospel for this week. Christ names His followers siblings - and if
siblings, then joint heirs. But as Jesus is accustomed to do, he turns the
meaning upside down.
In Matthew
Jesus says we care for the suffering of others will inherit the Kingdom. Now to
inherit normally means that the father dies. But God the Father doesn’t die,
it’s Her children that die to inherit. This is another aspect of what we’ve
been saying all along – that to live a Christian life, live as if you’ve
already dead.
As Mark
likes to do he inserts a story within a story. So within the story about Jesus’
family, we get the story of unclean spirits. Perhaps the major concept Jesus
turns on its head is the notion that God cannot be in the presence of the
unclean. This notion, that the unholy corrupts the holy, is the reason the
Pharisees have so many rules keeping people away from the Temple – away from
God.
Unclean
spirits in Mark cause suffering such as insanity, muteness and self-destructive
behavior. Jesus casts out these spirits. But if the presence of the unclean
chases away God, that only leaves Satan, whose minions these spirits are, with
authority to cast them out.
Jesus is
saying, you’ve got it all backwards. God cleans the unclean. The Holy makes the
unclean holy. The spirit that came to me in my baptism gave me the strength and
wisdom to resist Satan’s temptations. I have bound that strong man up and am
plundering his property, the ones his minions have claimed. You blaspheme the
Holy Spirit by not even allowing for its existence in your worldview.
So Jesus
walks through these barrier laws, the laws that keep people from God. He heals
on the Sabbath, He forgives sins, and He cleans the unclean. Those who have
been kept from god now know God. The God who hears the suffering of Her people.
This brings
us to living a Christian life - much of Christendom has flipped Jesus’ message
back over. I personally know many people who feel they can’t enter a Church
without cleaning up their act or getting their shit together. This breaks my
heart. It is not how God wants us to be thinking. In my own case there isn’t
any way I could have gotten what shit I’ve managed to get together without God.
And truth be
told, I used to think that God was sick at the sight of me and wanted me cast
where He didn’t exist – Hell. Now I understand that there is nowhere God can’t
be found. Even, and it pains me to say this, even in the abandoned Wal-Mart
where children as young as one year old – children who were ripped from their
mothers arms by ICE agents – where these children are kept in such conditions
that they won’t let US senators in to see them – even there God can be found.
And believe
me; I’m not assuming anyone there is showing these children any kindness.
Matthew tells us God knows when every sparrow falls – not that God prevents the
sparrow from falling. But if any of these children come out of this able to
trust or love anyone again - that I believe would be God at work.
And yet,
somehow, people are saying they deserve this. This is what comes of thinking of
people as unclean. This is what comes of believing other people will make you
unclean and unworthy of God. This is why Jesus tells us to love our enemy. It’s
all so easy to start thinking of our enemy as unclean, as other.
Thinking of
people as unworthy of God – as incapable of repentance and forgiveness, is not
the kingdom of God. Jesus is clear that some people don’t belong in the
kingdom, but also tells us we don’t get to decide who. That’s His job.
Our job,
what I really believe is our job, in addition to caring for the suffering, is
to set Jesus’ message back on its head. To tell our fellow Christians, and
those who suffer at their hands, that even a mustard seed of Holiness can clean
the unclean. That dehumanizing people in the name of purity is the opposite of
what Jesus taught.
We who look
foolish to the perishing, we who have inherited through our own death and not
Our Father’s, we who cannot live by the values of this world, we who desire to
live as if the Kingdom has already come, we who have had the spirit work within
us, we can glorify that spirit and not blaspheme it.
