Articles – Page 11 – Religion Online

The Search for Mary Magdalene

BOOK REVIEW:

Mary Magdalene, the First Apostle. By Ann Graham Brock. Harvard University Press, 235 pp.’ $25.00.

Mary Magdalene: A Biography. By Bruce Chilton, Doubleday, 206 pp., $23.95.

The Mary Magdalene Tradition. By Holly E. Hearon. Liturgical Press, 236 pp., $24.95.

The Gospel of Mary of Magdala. By Karen L. King. Polebridge Press, 230 pp., $20.00.

The Gospels of Mary. By Marvin Meyer. HarperSanFrancisco, 122 pp.’ $17.95.

In the late second-century text called the Gospel of Mary, the apostle Peter asks regarding Mary Magdalene, "Should we all turn and listen to her?" To judge by the marketing blitz these days, many readers would say yes (though that was not the answer Peter had in mind). Mary Magdalene has become popular enough to merit an Idiot’s Guide and her own shelf at Barnes and Noble.

Amid various modern fantasies about her, one can also find books by scholars. Marvin Meyer’s slim anthology provides readable translations of the basic texts from the New Testament and gnostic writings. Karen King offers a somewhat more erudite translation of the Gospel of Mary, with photographs of the original script, commentary on the work and comparisons to the New Testament texts. Ann Brock and Holly Hearon have turned their dissertations into quite readable discussions of traditions about Mary Magdalene. Brock focuses on disputes over women as leaders; Hearon, on the possibility that the canonical traditions reflect the activity of women story-tellers in the earliest communities.

The marketing money seems to be behind Bruce Chilton’s book. Like his biographies of Jesus and Paul, Chilton’s biography of Mary Magdalene combines idiosyncratic twists with historical reconstruction. He opposes the popular tendency to make Magdalene an "anti-Catholic Mary," and he agrees with the other authors in this group that the sooner the legends of Magdalene as lewd prostitute or as mother of a secret bloodline of Jesus’ descendants are debunked, the better.

But Chilton’s own book takes an odd turn. Rather than begin with Mary as representative of Jesus’ female disciples and first witness to his resurrection (as in John 20), he focuses on Luke’s story about Jesus driving demons out of her (8:2-3). He hypothesizes that Mary Magdalene was responsible for the stories about Jesus as an exorcist, and that the hostility shown toward Magdalene in church tradition was fueled by male clergy’s determination to retain control over exorcism and anointing.

However, it is Mary Magdalene’s visions of the risen Jesus that secured her title "apostle to the apostles" and formed the content of women’s storytelling. Hearon suggests that the opposition to women going from house to house in 1 Timothy 5:13 refers to the activities of such Christian women. The Christian women of the first century who repeated stories about Mary Magdalene in support of their own visions, prophecies and teachings would concur.

Until the late 19th century, historians interested in gnostic writings had to rely on summaries and quotations given by their orthodox Christian opponents. In 1896 a fifth-century Coptic codex was purchased for the Egyptian museum in Berlin. It contained three gnostic writings, which purported to present the teachings of the risen Jesus and part of an apocryphal work about Peter.

The three gnostic writings all take the form of dialogues in which the risen Savior appears to his disciples. The Gospel of Mary is the first work in the codex. However, its opening six pages and several pages in the middle are missing. The codex’s otherwise good condition led its first editor to suspect that its discoverers may have mutilated it. The opening pages must have included a notice about Jesus’ appearance and questions introducing a dialogue on the nature of matter and sin.

In this gospel, Jesus enjoins his followers to spread the "good news about the Kingdom." They are too frightened to do so, but Mary Magdalene steps in to encourage them. Peter asks her to relate to the others the teaching that she alone had received from Jesus. The introduction to that section indicates that she had seen the divine Savior in a vision. Her ability to remain unwavering in his presence would be a common description of spiritual perfection in both philosophical and religious circles at the time, as King notes. When her report of the vision concludes, a soul is ascending past the powers that seek to keep it imprisoned in the material world.

Instead of accepting Mary’s account, Peter and his brother Andrew turn against it, calling it a "strange teaching." Levi steps in to defend her and rebuke Peter, Peter remains in the grasp of anger, which his soul must overcome before it enters the heavenly realm, according to the vision-report.

Whoever compiled the writings in the Berlin Codex followed the Gospel of Mary with two more revelation dialogues, the Wisdom of Jesus Christ and the Secret Book of John. The Wisdom of Jesus Christ opens by describing a group of faithful followers composed of 12 disciples and seven women. Some questions are posed by "the disciples" or "the holy apostles," others by named disciples. One of the disciples named is "Mary," presumably Mary Magdalene.

Like the Gospel of Mary, the Secret Book of John recounts the revelation granted to a single disciple -- in this case, not Mary but John, the son of Zebedee. The concluding sentence asserts that John later conveyed this revelation to his fellow disciples.

In 1946 more Coptic codices appeared on the Cairo antiquities market. Material used in the covers indicates that the volumes were produced in the mid-fourth century. Many of the texts included in these codices contain gnostic teaching. Because they also promote ascetic detachment from bodily pleasures and passions, these writings may have appealed to the monks in the region, whose letters were found along with the texts.

An additional copy of the Wisdom of Jesus Christ and three copies of the Secret Book of John were found in these codices. Nag Hammadi Codex II includes three other works in which Mary Magdalene appears as an enlightened member of Jesus’ circle of disciples -- the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip and the Dialogue of the Savior.

Unfortunately, the Nag Hammadi collection did not produce any additional copies of the Gospel of Mary that might have supplied the missing pages. However, the thousands of Greek papyri discovered in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus over a hundred years ago have yielded two selections that parallel the surviving Coptic text. King presents this material in parallel columns. This evidence that two separate Greek versions circulated in the early third century pushes the likely date for the composition of the Gospel of Mary back to the late second century.

The Coptic translation remained very close to its Greek original, but there are some significant differences. The Greek version asserts that Jesus’ love for Mary was "steadfast," while the Coptic insists that Jesus ‘loved her more than us" (King’s translation). The Coptic version modifies the split between Mary and Peter. In that version, Levi’s defense of Mary is more successful, and the whole group of disciples goes out to preach the gospel. The disciples’ display of unity in the Coptic version suggests a recognition of Mary’s superior spiritual status.

Mary’s status among the disciples is also reflected in the reference in the Gospel of Philip to Jesus kissing Mary Magdalene. Despite modem speculation about this reference, it has nothing to do with a sexual relationship.

The Gospel of Philip identifies Mary Magdalene with wisdom. When the disciples ask Jesus, "Why do you love her more than us?" he responds with a parable contrasting sighted and blind people: in the dark, they are the same. When light comes, the sighted can see, but the blind cannot.

The Gospel of Thomas ends with Peter asking Jesus to exclude Mary because "females are not worthy of life."

Jesus refuses. Mary will undergo the same experience of recovering the original image of divine humanity as will the male ascetics in this tradition. Jesus promises to "make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males."

A similar phrase in the Gospel of Mary suggests that Jesus had to transform the disciples. Mary reminds the frightened group that "he has prepared us and made us human." Levi exhorts the disciples, "We should be ashamed and put on perfect humanity." The motif of conflict between Peter as spokes-person for male disciples and Mary Magdalene as an enlightened interpreter of Jesus’ teaching continued to be played out in gnostic circles in the fourth century.

Meyer provides a very brief selection from the rambling volumes of a revelation dialogue from the third century, Pistis Sophia ("Faith Wisdom"), in which Mary is quick to interpret the Savior’s words -- evidence of the Spirit working in her. Peter is hostile and jealous after being upstaged by a woman. The Savior mediates. He asks Mary to permit the male disciples to offer their interpretations but also affirms her spiritual perfection.

Meyer concludes the selections in his anthology with a lovely Manichaean hymn based on John 20:11-18: The 11 have dropped their allegiance to Jesus and returned to fishing. The Lord sends Mary to gather these lost sheep, saying, "Use all your skill and knowledge until you bring the sheep to the shepherd." The Manichaean author refers to Peter as a traitor for convincing the others to return to their old occupation. The risen Jesus gives Mary a special message to get Peter to comply with the summons.

These second-and third-century texts which challenged emerging orthodoxy reflected popular imagination. The dramatic story of Mary’s encounter with Jesus outside the tomb in John 20:11-18 probably circulated orally among women, as Hearon suggests. That story is the foundation for her reputation in the second and third centuries as the follower who possessed special insight into the teachings of the Savior. However, the gnostic texts attribute no special content to the revelations to Mary. Comments about the nature of matter and sin as well as Mary’s revelation about the soul’s return to the heavenly realm depend on non-Christian sources. Therefore readers who pick up the Gospel of Mary expecting to read a secret life of the historical Jesus are in for disappointment.

Despite the almost universal tendency to treat the second- and third century materials as evidence that the authors of the canonical Gospels ruthlessly suppressed traditions about Mary Magdalene, the truth may be simpler: the canonical Gospels preserve all the early traditions.

With his superb eye for giving voice to female disciples, such as the Samaritan woman and Martha and Mary, the Fourth Evangelist tells the story of Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus outside the empty tomb. Without that detail, gnostic Christians of the second century would never have cast her as the enlightened companion of the Savior. In short, the later traditions about her reflect a growth in women’s spiritual independence and imagination, not the fact that she was erased from the first-century record.

Wildfire (Acts10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-7)

Like a fire out of control, the Holy Spirit leapt from the Jews to the gentiles, amazing Peter and his fellow Christians from Jerusalem. The Spirit was wild, unpredictable, totally beyond human restraint.

Opinions vary about how important the Spirit was in Judaism before the Christian era. The Spirit had some connection to Sophia, the spirit of wisdom in the Old Testament, and to the creative aspect of God, as seen in Genesis 1 and sections of Ezekiel. The Spirit was also often related to prophetic utterance.

But in the early church the Spirit became the only explanation for the way the embers of the Jesus movement were miraculously fanned into a worldwide conflagration. And in the text from Acts, the Spirit is cited as the reason that movement easily surmounted racial barriers to ignite an incredible burst of enthusiasm among non-Jews.

The other texts are inadequate supporters, even tame by comparison:

"All the ends of the earth have seen / the victory of our God."

"This is the victory that conquers the world, our faith."

"This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." As marvelous as each of these texts is, the image of the unrestrained Spirit is more dynamic, more exciting.

Ironically, the church was already in the process of quenching the Spirit, or if it wasn’t, it soon would be. The Spirit is always most visible to us when we’re beaten, broken and in despair; the Spirit is less visible and less important when we’re winning, prosperous and in charge of the world. The Spirit works well for movements but fares poorly in institutions.

Aside from his remarks in the fourth Gospel, which arguably were supplied by the theologians of the nascent church, Jesus didn’t say a lot about the Holy Spirit. The Spirit descended on him at his baptism "like a dove" and led him into the wilderness to be tempted. Luke adds that he was "filled with the power of the Spirit" when he returned to Galilee, and that when he read from the scroll of Isaiah in the synagogue at Nazareth he began with the passage that said, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor" (Luke 4:14-18).

Yet, in the fourth Gospel, we are told that when Jesus joined the disciples in the upper room after the resurrection "he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit"’ (John 20:22), establishing a direct (and almost too obvious) connection between him and the amazing Power of the early church.

While we may believe in the Holy Spirit as a manifestation of God’s presence in the world, we sometimes wonder if the church’s early theologians invented this connection as an explanation of the continuity between Jesus and themselves, and if this invention didn’t in turn and inadvertently lead to orthodox formulations about the Trinity that belied the Spirit’s reality, much as the Kinsey Report misleads readers about the real joy and meaning of sex.

Maybe it ought to be a rule, perhaps called Flannery’s Rule for Flannery O’Connor, who wrote frequently about manifestations of the Spirit in backwoods preachers: the more eloquently and confidently we discuss the Holy Spirit and commemorate the Spirit in our high holy days, the less we are truly in touch with the Spirit. There is no more distorted reflection of the power of the Spirit than Pentecostal services in so-called liturgical churches, which embroider Christianity’s memory of great historical moments with the pomp and circumstance of banners, dramatic proclamations and unsingable hymns and anthems.

When I was a boy in Kentucky, I sometimes went down to the court house on Saturday night to watch the Holy Rollers, who held their meetings in one of the large court rooms. They sang and played guitars and rattled castanets until somebody, often a short, middle-aged woman of remarkable girth, felt seized by the Spirit and began to moan, gyrate and writhe on the floor. Others soon followed, and the shouting, praising and hullabaloo often escalated into ear-shattering pandemonium.

Later I wondered why these people had to wait until Saturday night for these feverish episodes to occur. Why weren’t they pneumatically beset during the week, when they were at work or sharing a family meal? As happy as O’Connor might have been with their Spirit-filled behavior, they were finally as institutional in their management of the Spirit as the Baptists, Methodists and Episcopalians.

None of this is to disparage belief in the Holy Spirit. It is only to remind us, as we celebrate Pentecost and design our sermons on the Holy Spirit, that the Spirit is always much bigger and more "other" than we -- or the Pentecostals -- normally think, and is capable of violently upending our worlds when we aren’t expecting it. Maybe Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk ought to be required reading at every Pentecost season, reminding us to fasten our seatbelts and wear crash helmets when we step into our pews, lest God decide to move among us again.

If and when it happens, we might even start baptizing people from alien backgrounds, as the early Christians did, and find our comfortable traditions shattered by the disconcerting presence of strangers in the faith -- including Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus.

Then and only then -- when we find ourselves in situations totally beyond our capacity to manage comfortably -- can we truly proclaim a new age of the Lord, the way Peter and the early Christians did.

Missing the Resurrection (Acts 1:15-17, 22-26; Ps. 1; 1 John 5:9-13; Jn. 17:6-19)

Imagine being Judas and having your name be come synonymous through the ages, in every country on earth, with an act of treachery. That would be heavy wouldn’t it?

Years ago, when my wife and I saw Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar on a London stage, the cast came down and talked with the audience during the intermission. We met the actor who played Jesus and the one who played Judas, and were told that they switched parts every few nights so other members of the cast wouldn’t get to hating them. "Before we did this," they said, "everybody ostracized the one being Judas."

Apparently the early church was quick to build a case against Judas -- Pentecost occurred less than two months after Jesus’ death -- and to vilify him for betraying the Master. Matthew 27:3-10 cites a tradition that says Judas repented of his act, brought back the 30 pieces of silver and flung them down before the chief priests and elders, and they in turn bought a field with it for burying the poor. In Acts, Peter says that Judas was the one who bought it, and the Greek word he uses implies that it was a small farm, not a mere field. The very disparity in accounts suggests a confused rush to besmirch the character of the man who had once been treasurer of Jesus’ little band.

It is easy to join in the near-universal condemnation of Judas. Look at the other texts in the lectionary readings:

"Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers" (Ps. 1:1). "Whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life" (1 John 5:12). Jesus prayed and thanked God that not one of his disciples had been lost "except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled" (John 17:12). We can hear the drumbeat of condemnation in all of these readings.

Interestingly, though, there are efforts afoot today to rehabilitate the figure of Judas. The same revisionist spirit that animates the DaVinci Code crowd is taking another look at the Zealot who may have led the soldiers to Jesus with the intention of forcing a cataclysmic denouement and a speedy arrival of the heavenly kingdom. What if Judas actually had more faith in Jesus’ preaching than the other disciples did, so that he believed this would happen and was cruelly rewarded for it by his jealous confrères?

The truth is, we will never really know the truth, because history is written by winners, and Judas, in this case, was a loser. Like military officers slain in battle, he had no chance to defend his reputation.

The reference to Judas in our text, however, is incidental to the transaction of a bit of business: because Judas had dropped out of the picture, it was necessary to appoint an apostle in his place. We have to remember how important the symbolism of Jesus’ having 12 apostles was; in the church as the new Israel, the apostles represented the 12 tribes of the kingdom.

The qualifications were simple; actually, there was only one. An apostle had to be someone who had been with Jesus from the beginning of his ministry, when he was baptized by John, and could now witness to his resurrection. There were two candidates: Joseph (aka Barsabbas or Justus) and Matthias. The Spirit was invoked, lots were cast and Matthias was appointed to take the place "in ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to hisown place" -- his own place being generally interpreted as "the grave" or "hell."

Many of us Protestants have lost a sense of connection with the apostolate. We have our bishops and moderators and princes (or princesses) of the pulpit, but we have very little sense of or appreciation for the importance of apostolic succession. Does this mean we have also lost the significance of appointing leaders who can be witnesses to the resurrection? When was the last time, as we were installing church leaders, that we asked the question, "Have you truly, genuinely experienced the resurrection of the Lord?"

Perhaps we should institute some annual ritual, based on this scripture in Acts, by which we memorialize Judas’s supposed act of perfidy and the selection of new leaders who have walked with Jesus in all aspects of his earthly ministry, from baptism to ascension. We could make it a kind of Jungian festival, in which we explore the darker sides of our own personalities, asking where we have betrayed Jesus in any way, and then, asking forgiveness, recommit our lives to faith in the resurrection. Such an occasion might possibly regalvanize our congregations.

Judas, we speculate, didn’t witness the resurrection. Too bad. What a story it would have been: "Slain leader appears to betrayer, embraces and reinstates him. Betrayer becomes ardent witness for leader."

Ironically, that’s what happened to Peter, isn’t it? He went on living, postperfidy, and it was his story, not Judas’s, that became part of the church’s heroic living legend. That’s life.

How do we preach this text? With wonder and passion, of course. But it is clearly the resurrection that makes the difference here. Those who believe in the resurrection are transformed by it, and those who don’t -- well, they’re hardly changed at all, are they?

It’s as simple as that -- and, in the case of the unchanged, as tragic as that.

Ministers who are themselves motivated by the resurrection will have no difficulty at all finding a way to preach the text.

ID Check (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23)

Have you ever been in a conversation in which it seemed that you and another person were not talking about the same thing even though you were arguing about it strenuously? Something like that is going on in Mark. Jesus and the Pharisees are in conflict with one another but not necessarily about the same things and certainly not on the same terms.

While Jesus is teaching and healing around the lake region in Galilee, some Pharisees and scribes from Jerusalem come north to investigate the popular rabbi-healer. This seems to be the first conflict with religious leaders from Jerusalem, but it is not the first time that Jesus has been criticized for violations of religious rules.

In this scene, the religious officials observe that Jesus and his followers are eating without first purifying (washing) their hands. The New Revised Standard Version uses parentheses to mark off the next verses, which explain "the tradition of the elders" that requires washing of one’s hands and food before eating. Jesus responds with a text from Isaiah that condemns those who comply with religious forms while "their hearts are far from me."

To keep the focus on the question of purity and eating with "defiled" hands, the lectionary omits the verses in which Jesus counterattacks by lifting up an example of using a technicality of the religious law to avoid fulfilling a deeper obligation. Describing something that sounds very much like a first-century tax shelter, he accuses the religious leaders of permitting someone to get around his obligation to support his parents by declaring that his assets have been set aside as an offering to God.

Jesus then returns to the issue raised by the Pharisees: what defiles a person is not what comes from the outside (dirt or other contamination that can be removed by washing) but rather what comes from inside the person. What makes a person unclean are the "evil intentions" of the heart: "fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly."

It is at this point that we experience two parties talking past each other. One imagines the Pharisees saying: ‘Well, of course! Violations of the moral law arise from the heart and mind and will. But that’s not what we were talking about! We were talking about laws having to do with religious purity!"

The Pharisees are usually viewed as simply majoring in minutiae. But that does a disservice to them and obscures the issues. Scholars today suggest that the Pharisees should be understood as a reform movement within Jewish life of the first century. Their goal was to help ordinary people become more observant of the law (both written and oral) as a way of affirming or reinforcing their Jewish identity. For this religious minority living in an occupied territory of the Roman Empire and in the diverse culture of the Mediterranean world, a critical problem was how to keep faith and traditions alive and vibrant. The Pharisees’ solution was to insist that some of the laws required of the priests be extended to all. The washing of hands, food and cooking utensils was one example. For most Pharisees, these observances did not replace the moral law but were considered important religious (we might say "spiritual") disciplines.

Jesus takes a different tack. Especially in Mark’s Gospel, he is portrayed as one who is constantly violating various religious observances in favor of doing ministry. Jesus heals on the Sabbath, touches a leper and a dead child, is touched by the woman suffering from hemorrhages and does not fast. He eats with tax collectors and other notorious sinners. Each of these is a violation of the Pharisees’ understanding of religious laws that were designed to maintain boundaries between faithful or observant Jews and all others. Jesus’ behavior seems to say: beware when religious observance gets in the way of fulfilling the heart of the law, which is love of God and neighbor. Perhaps our situation today makes it especially easy for us to identify with that in Mark. For many Christians, there seems to be a need to find ways to guard the borders of religious identity All sorts of issues are lifted up as identity-defining, and the stance one takes with respect to them determines whether one is a "real Christian." In the American context, most of these issues have to do with human sexuality. Abortion, contraception and homosexuality have all been made into boundary-defining issues; they have become the "lines in the sand" for whether one judges others to be Christian or not. In the minds of many, these are not matters on which Christians may hold divergent opinions and remain in fellowship with others. Rather, opposition to these practices is seen as part and parcel of maintaining the core of Christian faith in an increasingly secular world.

It is worth noting that Jesus does not condemn the practice of ritual cleansing; neither does he condemn observance of the Sabbath. Both are good and salutary traditions. In fact, both practices are part of a healthy life as well as ways to honor God. The problem arises when religious practices and doctrines that are intended to bring life and health to the spirit and community become barriers to reaching out to others with the love, justice and mercy of God -- or when "human traditions" are substituted for "the commandment of God."

The question that drove the Pharisees and that motivates some contemporary Christians is an important one: in a religiously diverse culture, how does one maintain Christian identity and integrity? When we respond, we can do no better than Jesus did when asked what was the greatest of all of God’s commands -- love God and neighbor. It is as simple and as complex as that.

Essential Question (John 6:56-69)

For five weeks the Lectionary journey through the Gospel of Mark is interrupted by a brief sojourn into the sixth chapter of John. The chapter opens with two familiar stories from the synoptic Gospels: the feeding of the multitude (a story so important that it appears six times in the four Gospels) and Jesus walking on the water. Then there are dialogues, first with the crowd and then with "the Jews" (probably better Understood as Judean officials) about the meaning of the miracle of the feeding and about Jesus’ true identity. As is often the case with John, small, ordinary words such as bread and life are freighted with theological meaning. Jesus provided bread, but his bread is not like the manna that God provided in the wilderness; this bread is himself, his very life; and those who eat it "will live forever."

In this final scene, the conversation shifts from an external debate to an internal struggle among Jesus’ followers. Some are murmuring among themselves; "This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?" Even the reader, who knows that Jesus has been using ordinary words to refer to extraordinary things, is inclined to agree: "Whoever eats me will live because of me." Centuries of eucharistic theology give us a way to understand these words, but at the time they were more than puzzling -- they probably were downright offensive. Rightly reading the mood, Jesus says, "Does this offend you?"

His challenge sets up a critical turning point in this Gospel. Not only are we told that one of Jesus’ followers would betray him; we also learn that some of those who had been following Jesus "turned back and no longer went about with him." This division in the ranks (implied much later in the other Gospels) is made explicit here. The group gets smaller as the stakes get higher.

Jesus then turns to the Twelve and says, "Do you also wish to go away?" Peter plays the spokesperson, just as he does in the other Gospels: "Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life." While the words are different, this interchange is much the same as Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi. There, Jesus asks, "Who do people say that I am?" -- to which Peter responds, "You are the Messiah" (Mark 8:27-30). In both cases, the miracle of the feeding is the backdrop for the crucial question: who is Jesus really?

This is, of course, the perennial Christian question. The answers are almost as varied as the believers. The first 400 years of the church’s life were largely given over to debates about the meaning and implications of confessing Jesus as Savior, Lord and Son of God, and the answers were shaped by the believers’ contexts. The controversies of the early years of the church’s life were conducted in the terms of Greek philosophy, and the issues were about what sort of being Jesus was ("fully human, fully God" is how the creed was finally formulated), and how he was related to God the Father (homoousion, or "one in being," was the conclusion).

In the modern period, Jesus has been reinterpreted with both disastrous and constructive consequences. Some Christians during the Nazi regime in Germany attempted to turn Jesus, a Jew from Palestine, into an Aryan superhero. Karl Barth recognized the travesty and declared, in the "Theological Declaration of’ Barmen," that the true Christ is the one revealed in scripture and is Lord of culture, not subject to it. In more recent years, theologians from Latin America found in Jesus an ally in the struggle of justice for the poor. While it is difficult to find any particular economic or political philosophy in Jesus’ teachings, his care for those on the margins of society and criticism of those who exploited or rejected them is evident in the Gospels.

Publications produced by members of the Jesus Seminar (Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and others) and those who question or counter their conclusions (N. T. Wright and Luke Timothy Johnson) have fed public interest in the person and significance of Jesus. The seminar seeks to understand Jesus by looking at biblical stories and his teaching in light of what can be known or presumed about the context or circumstances in which he lived. The second group wants to take the account of Jesus’ life and ministry preserved in scripture as both faithful record and record of faith.

These scholars have provided intriguing and inspiring insights, and generations to come will add more because the question of who Jesus is will never be exhausted. It is more than a question of getting the right data (or getting the data right); it is a question of faith and of relationship. Each generation, in its own peculiar and particular context, will have new questions and new insights. There will always be mistakes, and our scholarship will sometimes lead to dead ends. But because we are accompanied in this enterprise by the Holy Spirit, our study and preaching may lead to new insights and fresh understanding.

In The Essential Jesus, Crossan points out that one of the most popular visual representations of Jesus in the early years of the Christian movement was the feeding of the multitude. Long before Christians portrayed Christ crucified they showed him breaking bread. Crossan suggests that this reflects the context of the first Christians as urban poor people for whom bread was a daily concern. Perhaps it is also a reflection of a fundamental insight: Jesus and bread, eating and feeding, table fellowship and faith, food and life -- these things go together. "Whoever eats me will live because of me." Blessed are we if we do not take offense but are led by these words to abundant life.

Contemplative Worship

For some people, Memphis, Tennessee, conjures visions of southern religion: folks hootin’ and hollerin’ about God, eternal damnation and hell; sweating preachers thundering on about sex, drinking and Democrats. Southern religion is all heat and fire, the blinding light of Jesus converting sinners to saints in a flash. This is what more reasonable Christians used to ridicule as "enthusiasm."

The Church of the Holy Communion, an Episcopal parish in Memphis, stands in stark contrast to these stereotypes. Situated on a prominent street corner in a prosperous part of town, Holy Communion has white columns and a graceful spire that point seekers toward heaven, and a genteel brick exterior and clear glass windows that represent a different southern tradition, one of measured and rational faith.

I join about 100 others for a Sunday evening service of contemplative worship. Electric lights are dimmed, and the primary light in the building comes from hundreds of candles on the high altar and the chancel rail, around the lectern and pulpit. A large Celtic cross graces the altar. Icons flank the table, along with two large racks of unlit votive candles. A small group of musicians is playing an Irish tune, "Si Bheag Si Mhor," on hammered dulcimer, harp, guitar and wooden flute.

A bell rings. The priest enters and draws the congregation to prayer with words written by the Iona community in Scotland: "Breath of God, Breath of life, Breath of deepest yearning." They respond, "Come, Holy Spirit." The invocation continues:

Comforter, Disturber, Interpreter, Enthuser,

Come, Holy Spirit.

Heavenly Friend, Lamplighter, Revealer of truth,

Midwife of change,

Come, Holy Spirit.

The Lord is here.

God’s spirit is with us.

The congregation sings an Irish hymn, ‘How lovely is thy dwelling place, O Lord of hosts to met" After a reading from the Gospel of Matthew, we sit in silence. The priest offers a meditation on the Gospel and we sit in silence again -- this time for two minutes. As the musicians play, people get up, walk to the altar and light candles in the votive stand as a symbol of their prayers. The soft candlelight glows brighter with each prayer. "See that ye be at peace among yourselves," offers the minister, "and love one another. Follow the example of good men and women of old, and God will comfort you and help you, both in this world and in the world which is to come."

The music carries us to communion, and the leader invites us to come forward and partake of the Lord’s Supper:

This is the table, not of the church, but of the Lord.

It is made ready for those who love him

And for those who want to love him more.

So, come, you who have much faith and you who have little,

You who have been here often and you who have not been here long,

You who have tried to follow and you who have failed.

Come, because it is the Lord who invites you.

It is his will that those who want him should meet him here.

It is an altar call, but not like the altar calls I remember in southern churches, where salvation came through fear. Here the invitation is to dine with God -- not to submit to God’s gaze of condemning judgment. Instead of "Just as I Am," I hear a traditional Scottish ballad as I walk down the aisle. A picture of Holy Communion’s spire comes to mind and I remember the words of St. Bernard of Clairvaux: "Continual silence, and removal from the noise of the things of this world and forgetfulness of them, lifts the heart and asks us to think of the things of heaven and sets our heart upon them."

And, as in all "good southern religion," there is heat and fire, with the blinding light of Jesus pointing us heavenward. At Holy Communion, however, the heat and fire is in contemplation, in candles flickering with prayer. The blinding light shines through silence and the Spirit comes not in a whirlwind, but in stillness. We are walking the sawdust trail as our ancestors did, only here the trail is marked by icons. The service ends with a hymn to the tune of "Ar Hyd Y Nos":

Go, my children, with my blessing, never alone.

Waking, sleeping, I am with you, you are my own.

In my love’s baptismal river I have made you mine forever.

Go, my children, with my blessing, you are my own.

At the end of the service, I am not the only one weeping.

In January 2001, when I was teaching a course at Wesley Seminary in Washington, D.C., a student asked me what I thought the 21st century would be like. Without a moment’s hesitation I replied, "Noisy. It will be noisy" So I have been surprised by the silence I have encountered in many churches. As a girl I rarely experienced silence in mainline churches and seldom witnessed acts of prayer. My church had succumbed to writer Richard Rohr’s prediction, "When the church is no longer teaching the people how to pray, we could almost say it will have lost its reason for existence," Yet in the congregations I have visited, silence, meditation and contemplation were commonplace, and many new members testified to the spiritual attraction of prayer. Martha, a member of Holy Communion, is one of them. "Not many churches give you real silence, if you think about it. I’ve come to value it . . . Encountering God certainly [happens] in silence."

The contemplative nature of ancient Celtic airs and the deep silence of the liturgy at the Church of the Holy Communion are only two examples. I witnessed Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists and Congregationalists practicing silence at board meetings, prayer meetings, Bible studies, pastoral care sessions, labyrinth walks, yoga classes and discernment groups. I shared in centering prayer with Presbyterians and went on retreat with Episcopalians following the teachings of the monk Thomas Keating. A group of Lutherans who engaged in practices drawn from Ignatian spiritual exercises told me that they had "learned to listen to God, not just to pray for things." I watched small children in their Sunday school classrooms sit -- for a few seconds -- in God’s stillness. Mainline Protestants, known for their earnest activity, are finding God in silence as if they were seasoned monastics or practiced Quakers.

Some consider silence to be boring and an evangelism turnoff, and see contemplation as something practiced only by supersaints. A fellow historian reminded me that "the tradition has always reserved the contemplative life, and contemplation itself, for the very few." After all, contemplation leads directly to God’s divine presence, and such "unmediated access to the divine energy" can be spiritually dangerous for novices. Following this logic, one might decide that it’s best to keep everyday Christians distracted with overhead projectors, rock bands and podcast sermons.

In our society, noise disconnects us from others and drives us deeper into isolation, claims David Schimke in the Utne Reader. "Surround sound," he says, "is the new, virtual picket fence." P. M. Forni, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, says that noise is "part of a phenomenon expressed in ancient Latin as horrovacui, which is abhorrence of the void, fear of emptiness, horror of nothingness. I believe that we often overuse electronic gadgets for the same reason that we spend innumerable hours shopping: We do not want to be left alone with our thoughts." Forni believes that one of the most disquieting phenomena of our time is the flight from thinking, meditating and ruminating. When was the last time we followed a thought where it would take us without our eyes or ears being pulled away by a screen or an artificial sound?

We need to rediscover silence because, as 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart said, "Nothing in all creation is so like God as silence," To rediscover silence, as these churches are doing, is to rediscover God. The Church of the Holy Communion has come to understand itself as "the sacred center" of Memphis, where God’s presence is palpable, where people serve in Jesus’ name and where spiritual growth is a communal hope. Holy Communion is becoming an open monastic community with contemplation at its center.

For much of its history, the church focused on tasteful worship and good works. Piety was deeply personal and privatized; people did not talk about their faith. Today, however, parishioners are expressing their hunger for a deeper spiritual life. Robbie and John McQuiston, who have been practicing the rule of St. Benedict with a small group of parishioners for several years. were finding it difficult to connect Benedictine spirituality with the life of the larger congregation. Then Gary Jones arrived at Holy Communion. Jones’s first day at his new parish was the day of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. When he arrived at church that morning, Jones and his new staff hung a huge banner on the front of the church: OPEN FOR PRAYER. Martha refers to this time as "kairos time, God’s time," a unique moment that birthed new possibilities. The people of Holy Communion were about to embark on a journey in prayer. They were open for prayer, open to prayer and open to change. Thomas Merton says: "Prayer is then not just a formula of words, or a series of desires springing up in the heart -- it is the orientation of our whole body, mind and spirit to God in silence, attention, and adoration. All good meditative prayer is a conversion of our entire self to God."

Gary Jones knows about meditative prayer. As a young priest he spent time with the brothers of the Society of St. John the Evangelist; the crucible of silence shaped his ministry. By the time he came to Holy Communion, he had led two other parishes in the practice of contemplation and the cultivation of the inner life. He quotes Carl Jung: "If you can’t stand to be alone in silence with yourself, why do you inflict yourself on us?" From the earliest Christian thinkers onward, tradition has insisted that faith, rightly understood, is a quest to know oneself in God. To run from the self is to run from God. People need silence; they need a recovery of the contemplative arts of "thinking, meditating, ruminating."

These things, Jones believes, are not reserved for a spiritual elite, but contribute to the balance necessary for a healthy personal life and a vital congregation. "We need it now greater than ever. Our haste leads us to forget the needs of the soul. We will latch onto anything to feed us. We hope that something -- our clergy, a new love relationship -- will satisfy our restlessness."

Holy Communion’s pathway of contemplation includes reflection, attention and restraint. Restraint is not a word that most people associate with contemporary Christianity, but at Holy Communion restraint is not a spiritual avoidance tactic, but a kind of balance that leads to a deep personal relationship with God. This emphasis grows out of the traditions of Benedictine spirituality, which encourage sensible engagement with principles of mind, body and spirit. With such balance, contemplation does not veer into spiritual excess or elitism but instead leads one to practical wisdom. As one parish publication puts it:

At Church of the Holy Communion, we work to foster the connections that matter -- connections with one’s self, with one’s community, with one’s family and with God.

Those links are strengthened not just by Bible study or prayer, not just by trying to love your family or your neighbor, but by balanced attention to caring for one’s mind, body and spirit.

Holy Communion’s contemplative and mystical practices are loosely drawn from the Rule of St. Benedict, and bits and pieces of monastic practice may be seen throughout the congregation. Small groups teach classical forms of prayer and even chant ("Chant, It’s Not Just for Monks Anymore"). In addition to the Sunday evening service, there is a daily morning prayer service modeled after the monastic practice of hearing scripture read in community. Gary refers to the service as "a corner of monasticism in the parish." Brothers from the Society of St. John the Evangelist visit the parish, and members of the congregation make retreats with the monks. Parishioners are expected to tend to their spiritual lives by participating in prayer and Bible study.

Like Gary Jones, Pastor N. Graham Standish of Calvin Presbyterian Church in Zelienople, Pennsylvania, believes that contemplation is essential to a life that connects the physical and spiritual, the personal and communal. He thinks that most mainline churches have fallen prey to a businesslike functionalism that causes spiritual "respiratory failure." "The first sign of openness to the spiritual is the extent to which Robert’s Rules of Order dominates the proceedings of the church. The more determined the church’s leaders are to follow these rules to the letter, the more the spiritual is cut off." Just as Robert’s Rules of Order is the traditional secular guide to meeting procedure, prayer, Standish insists, is the foundation for a spiritual church.

Standish began introducing silence into the congregation because he was convinced that spiritual renewal starts not with "big" programming, but with listening to God’s word, meditating on scripture and discerning God’s will. He dreamed of "a congregation of mystics," and quotes Quaker theologian Thomas Kelly, who says that at the core of every church lies "a blessed community" made up of mystics centered in prayer. Like Jones, Standish describes his congregation as a church full of people with direct, personal experience of God.

One member recalls how change started to happen:

As slowly as you can, [Standish] has tried to mentor us by bringing more silence, more resting in God’s presence. Gently because so many people are uncomfortable with silence. He’s introduced this in very non-threatening packages, a little bit of reflection before we start a committee meeting. We will meditate on scripture as a way of settling down before we do business. We’re saying "God, we want you to come in before us, plow this row before we go.

"Plow this row before we go" reflects the simple Quaker feel to the practice of silence at Calvin. Unlike Holy Communion, where mysticism tends toward the sacramental and transcendent, Calvin Presbyterian practices a more earthy, pragmatic mysticism, finding God’s presence in the stuff of everyday life. Carol, a prayer minister in the church, longs for even more silence in the worship service; "I wish everyone would sit in silence between sections of the service. I think it’s like spinach. We all need it."

The key to Calvin’s vibrancy is linking desire for God with a homey simplicity that mirrors both the great Christian tradition of mystical experience and the small-town sensibilities of historic American Protestantism. Members practice silence at a small Wednesday evening centering and healing service. They pray when they knit shawls for those in need. "As we make these shawls," they pray, "may we keep in mind that we are surrendering our hands to God’s use." Outside, a handmade rock labyrinth offers a path for contemplative prayer.

A pamphlet titled "A Guide, to Listening and Hearing God" suggests that one read scripture regularly and learn to recognize God’s voice. On the back is a benediction by Standish, "I wish you God’s blessing in your listening." In a way, that describes his ministry to the whole congregation -- to model and mentor listening, the power of silence and prayer for all. Business, board and budget meetings begin with silence, and many meetings have an extended time of centering prayer built into their agendas. An elder in the congregation says that the meetings are like mini-prayer meetings, with elections that result in "God’s dream team" leadership. The people of Calvin testify to many personal and communal experiences of God’s grace that have come to them as they have learned to pay attention in silence and prayer.

At Sunday services, silence does not focus on the holy meal as it does in the liturgy at Holy Communion. Rather, the focus is on prayer, singing, the reading of the word and preaching. Silence serves as a spiritual white space between the words, allowing each person to hear the word within. A member remarks, "The worship service is a hybrid of this island of reverence, quietness and reflection combined with a dose of what you do with your life now and what God is doing." Services begin with a centering chant, followed by a prayer of humility and a time of silent confession. The music is mostly contemporary, but not in the "happyclappy" style. Instead, there are meditative Taizé chants and songs like "The Centering Song" and "Simple Gifts." Standish and music director Bruce Smith write music too. Their "Rest in the Bow with Me" provides an unexpected image of contemplative prayer:

Storms and high seas crash over me, Threatening to drown my soul.

Seeking the voice of Christ, I hear:

"Rest in the bow with Me."

Communion is offered every week at the early service and once a month at the later service. But I sense God’s presence at both services and recall Quaker friend Brent Bill’s words, "Worship becomes Eucharist when we sense God present with our group." The congregation of mystics at Calvin Presbyterian make Eucharist not only with bread and wine, but with words and silence.

After decades of decline, Calvin is growing again, with weekly Sunday attendance up from 100 to 240. The church has begun a building program. "There is a strong belief here now," Standish says, "that when you root things in prayer, God actually does answer.

"Praying congregations are not temples of holiness. They are not filled with mystics or experts on prayer, says Jane Vennard, a United Church of Christ minister. "Praying congregations are lively places made up of diverse people who are longing to take prayer seriously." Holy Communion and Calvin are full of normal, struggling people who are rediscovering God in silence. The form their prayer takes is as different as the congregations themselves: centering, contemplative, meditative, while knitting shawls or building Habitat houses, in worship, in homes and small groups, in closets, alone and with others. They are finding that the practice of silence is not narrow, strict or exclusive. Rather, it is a way marked with a large banner: OPEN FOR PRAYER.

Wisdom (James 3:13 — 4:3a; Mark 9:30-37)

What is the point of pursuing wisdom? Well, to become wise. That is, wisdom is its own end, or its own reward. This sort of answer may suffice for philosophers (those who are "lovers of wisdom"), but James has other ideas. There are at least two respects in which James and other Christians might think differently about wisdom.

The first is that wisdom is not solely a contemplative attainment, but must manifest itself in particular actions. The wise person does not demonstrate wisdom primarily by thinking wise thoughts or uttering wise sayings. Rather, he or she lives a life punctuated by "deeds of gentleness born of wisdom." James elaborates on this by noting that the wisdom from above is "pure, peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits." Moreover, wisdom is linked with the activity of peacemaking, which yields "a harvest of righteousness." Although he does not say it quite this way one can imagine James saying, "Wisdom without works (of a certain kind) is dead (or not real wisdom),"

It is also striking to note how similar the works of wisdom are to the characteristics of love as Paul lays them out in 1 Corinthians James are marked by practices that restore and deepen relationships between believers. Mercy, peacemaking and the willingness to yield all operate in situations of conflict or potential conflict. These are the dispositions and practices that keep our relationships in good working order and help to repair them when they break. Indeed, one might even say that gentleness, mercy and peacemaking are practices that characterize God’s action in reconciling all things to God in Christ.

It is not surprising that James moves from a discussion of wisdom to an examination of the sources of conflicts and disputes among believers. He locates conflict and discord in the frustration of desire and says that not only do we suffer from frustrated desires, desires are at war within us.

Contrary to some popular misconceptions, Christians are not opposed to desire and desires. Scripture manifests a rich vocabulary of desire: "My soul thirsts for God"; "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness"; "I press on to grab hold of that for which Christ first grabbed hold of me." Of course, there is also the Song of Songs. No, the problem is not desire but, as James rightly sees, the problem is the objects we desire, how we order our desires, and the motives we have in pursuing them. According to James, we are a mass of conflicting desires, each one screaming for priority and action. Such inner conflicts lead to conflict and discord in our relations with others. How could it be otherwise? Given what James has said so far, then, one of wisdom’s proper roles concerns the shaping and ordering of our desires.

In the light of James’s discussion of the works of wisdom, we have good reason to think that our desires are being rightly shaped and ordered if our relationships with our brothers and sisters are in good working order, and if we are eager and able to repair them when they suffer damage. This will result in lives that are peaceable, gentle and merciful.

There is a second issue for Christians to consider regarding wisdom, one that ties in more directly with the Gospel reading. From the very earliest days of the church, Christians have recognized that their notions of wisdom were in competition with other notions of wisdom. Thus, although nobody in the first century or today would be opposed to wisdom, one might expect some profound disagreements about what constitutes wisdom and wise action.

In the Gospel reading Jesus introduces the issue that is the linchpin of all Christian accounts of wisdom: the cross. What Jesus fleetingly introduces, Paul later makes into a theme. The cross is the central moment at which the wisdom of God is displayed against the wisdom of the world. Christ’s true wisdom is self-giving, self-offering obedience to God for the benefit of others. Like the Corinthians to whom Paul wrote, the disciples seem unable to grasp this as anything like wisdom. As it turns out, their desires and hopes have been shaped in ways that make it impossible for them to see the cross and resurrection as the fitting climax to God’s dealings with the world.

This becomes more pronounced in the second part of the reading from Mark. The disciples have been arguing about who among them is greatest. Interestingly, Jesus does not rebuke them for aspiring to greatness. Indeed, his remarks seem to encourage such aspirations and desires. The problem comes from the fact that apart from understanding the cross, it is impossible to understand how becoming the last of all and a servant of all constitutes greatness. The wisdom of the cross is the same wisdom that is capable of welcoming a child in Christ’s name. Too often Christians appear to view greatness just as everyone else does. Power and wealth become the defining characteristics of those the churches hold up as great. Those who welcome the children are generally invisible.

The crucified and resurrected Christ becomes the standard against which to measure all accounts of wisdom. As often as we fail to grasp this we will lack the wisdom needed for shaping and regulating our desires for greatness or anything else. As James indicates, such a failure will lead to conflicts and disputes with others, while robbing us of resources for resolving those disputes peaceably. Most significantly, we will not be capable of properly welcoming those children whom Christ sends into our lives and may thereby lose the ability to welcome God.

In the Know (James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-88)

My wife and I have two Sons 12 and 14 and a standard-size refrigerator. Hence, we spend a lot of time at the grocery store. As I wait to pay for one day’s installment of food, I am invited to learn the full story about the semiprivate lives of numerous celebrities. If the number of these publications is anything to go by, our desire for insider knowledge is insatiable. We want to know all of the details and we want to know them now.

Our sons are especially curious in this regard. When our boys come upon us as we are talking about a crisis at work or in the life of someone we know, they want to know what is going on. Sometimes this reflects compassion, sometimes adolescent curiosity, sometimes a concern that this crisis may have a direct impact on their lives. Explaining that they do not need to know or are not yet ready to learn about these matters simply intensifies their desire. They wonder how someone can be trustworthy if he or she will not tell them everything -- immediately.

In the so-called information age, the idea that we might not yet be ready -- emotionally, intellectually, practically -- to know some things tests our patience and our credulity. I suppose this is why conspiracy theories thrive in the absence of knowledge. It is always easier to suppose that there is a concerted plot to hide things from us than to acknowledge our own inabilities or lack of preparation.

Jesus was a focal point for conspiracy theories long before novelist Dan Brown came on the scene. Paying attention to this reading from Mark’s Gospel may help explain why. Even at the high point of his ministry in Galilee, people were not quite sure what to make of Jesus. Some thought he was John the Baptist; others said he was Elijah or one of the other prophets. When Jesus asked his closest followers who they thought he was, Peter responded, "You are the Messiah." In Matthew, Jesus attributes Peter’s utterance to divine revelation. Luke and Mark are silent about the origin of this remark. Perhaps Peter was inspired; perhaps he simply took up language that he had heard others use. It does not really matter: he said it, and Jesus responded that he didn’t want Peter or the others to say it again until further notice.

Jesus, the embodiment of truth, wanted his disciples to withhold information. On the face of it, this does not seem right. Spreading the word that Jesus is the Messiah seems like a worthy and even necessary enterprise. Jesus’ call to silence concerning his identity reminds us that knowing the right form of words to say about Jesus might not be sufficient. Clearly, Peter knew the right words, but by the end of the passage, it is also clear that his use of the term Messiah and Jesus’ identity as the Messiah did not match up.

For Peter, the term Messiah was incompatible with Jesus’ obedience to God and the suffering and death that would come from his obedience. For Peter, Messiah and cross just did not belong together. Further, it becomes clear that Peter was not alone in his views. As the Gospel unfolds, virtually all of Jesus’ closest followers abandon, betray or deny him as he moves ever closer to the cross. This recognition lies at the root of Jesus’ unwillingness to have his followers going around Galilee saying that he is the Messiah hut not understanding the nature of his messiahship. As Jesus made clear, such understanding is not simply a matter of mastering the correct vocabulary to use about Jesus. Rather, we learn how to speak properly of Jesus as the Christ only in the course of taking up our cross and following him.

In their formation of new believers the earliest Christians recognized this requirement. As new believers advanced in their lives of discipleship, they were taught more about Jesus. This instruction aimed at further deepening their discipleship, which in turn formed them into people capable of receiving further knowledge about the faith. In this way they were led to make an eloquent profession of their faith in baptism. Christian eloquence is perfected in a life of discipleship.

In this light, it is interesting to note that James’s admonitions about the tongue come immediately after his discussion of the connections between faith and works. If faith without works is dead, then we may also take James to be arguing that without faith and works our tongues tend to be instruments for harm rather than good. This is in part because our speech has the disturbing habit of revealing and even magnifying deficiencies in our character. As James laconically notes, fig trees can’t bear olives. James’s more general concern and Peter’s very specific example point out that the tongue can be an all-too-revealing mirror into one’s character. This assumption makes sense of James’s warnings against wanting to become a teacher. When I read these verses I am always tempted to take a vow of silence.

Nevertheless, James seems to think both that some should become teachers and that all of us should seek wisdom (2:13). This would indicate that the best path is neither speechlessness nor the tell-all tone of the supermarket tabloids and talk shows.

Peter seems to bounce from one verbal extreme to the other -- at one point saying more about Jesus than he really understands, later denying that he even knows him. In spite of his verbal gaffes, however, Peter does not cease to follow. His persistence demonstrates that following Jesus to the cross and beyond has the power to transform us and thereby our speech through the work of the Spirit. It would appear that following begets wisdom, and that wisdom will manifest itself in speech and silence appropriate to the various occasions in which we find ourselves.

God’s Choice (James 2:1-17; Mark 7:24-37)

The juxtaposition of this text from James with Mark’s story of the healing of the Syro-Phoenician woman reveals a wicked sense of humor on someone’s part. The passage in James begins with an assertion of the fundamental incompatibility of faith in Christ, the Lord of Glory, with partiality in human relations. It then goes on to list a variety of ways in which believers might typically display such favoritism. In Mark, Jesus seems to engage in just the sort of activity that James warns against, refusing to heal a very sick child because she and her mother are not Jewish.

This is a bit of a puzzle. On the one hand, James is uncompromising in his assertion that making distinctions between people based on their wealth is a violation of the order to love your neighbor as yourself. Such distinctions work in opposition to God’s plan of choosing "the poor of the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom." These displays of partiality also seem downright foolish since it is the rich who are oppressing Christians, dragging them into court and blaspheming God’s name. On the other hand, Jesus initially refuses to heal the child of the Syro-Phoenician woman because she is not one of the children of Israel. In all other respects, this little girl is precisely the sort of person that Jesus delights in healing. She is suffering; she and her mother seek Jesus out; she and her mother are probably alone (or else the father and husband would have approached Jesus) and therefore marginal in their society. She and her mother seem to bear no responsibility for her sickness. Why should Jesus exercise such ethnic scruples here when he is, in fact, outside of the land of Israel? Of course, Jesus does heal the girl in this story. Nevertheless, we are left with a sense of unease that lingers long after the Gospel has moved on to other matters.

In this story, unlike so many other passages in the Gospels, we see that God’s election of Israel actually has a practical bite to it that makes us very uncomfortable. Throughout the Gospels, but particularly in the infancy stories and in the passion stories, we are repeatedly presented with Jesus’ Jewishness and his intimate connection to God’s ongoing dealings with the people of Israel. When terms like Messiah. King of the Jews, Son of David are used of Jesus, we can keep them at a high enough level of abstraction that they need not disrupt our settled, complacent gentile Christian identities. But when God’s election of Israel becomes the basis for Jesus’ initial refusal to heal this girl, we cannot avoid feeling indignant. Health care on the basis of election? Inconceivable! Our egalitarian compassion runs up against God’s gracious choice of Abraham. We (complacently gentile) Christians are, of course, grafted into this family of Abraham through Christ. We are adopted members of a family, fully included yet living in a house that was not precisely designed for us.

We cannot fight God’s election; we cannot overcome our gentleness. This is what is so galling. No amount of growth in virtue, no regimen of self-improvement, no pattern of self-discipline will ever change the fact that I am a gentile and God chose to save the world through Abraham and his seed. This matter is beyond my control. Recognizing this is the first step toward humbly and properly conforming my life to God’s gracious working in the world. This seems to be part of what Paul wants to emphasize to the Christians in Rome.

I suspect that most people I worship with are far more bothered by God’s gracious election of Israel -- something we cannot control -- than by James’s admonitions about pandering to the wealthy and powerful. We are much more comfortable operating in the realm of power and wealth because it seems like something we can manage for our own benefit and even for the benefit of others.

The most charitable account one can offer of the actions of the characters addressed in James is that they were seeking to cultivate the favor of the rich and powerful to benefit the church and its mission. As James sees it, these Christians’ attempts to be "players" among the rich and powerful have two results. The first is that instead of being players, they end up being played. The rich continue to oppress, litigate and blaspheme.

Second, in seeking to cultivate the favor of the rich and powerful these believers end up working at cross purposes with God. God has chosen "the poor of the world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom." Thus, James ends up addressing a dual failure. There is the failure to manage the wealthy and the powerful to the church’s advantage. This admonition is not, however, a call to ever more shrewd and effective management. Instead, James calls believers to address their second and more fundamental failure. This is the believers’ failure to apprehend God’s pattern of choosing and to fit themselves into that pattern.

The Syro-Phoenician woman understands that God’s election of Israel entails Jesus’ feeding of the children of Abraham. She does not argue with the fairness of God’s choice. Rather, as if she had studied the Old Testament, she recognizes that such an abundant overflowing of grace must result in "all the nations being blessed." Instead of fighting God’s choice, she attends to its importance. Her faith and her wit enable her to fit herself and her daughter into this choice -- with miraculous results.

Search and Restore (Mark 9:38-50; James 5:13-20)

If you are reading this column hoping to get some insight into Mark 9:49-50, you can stop now. These verses are intensely obscure; the commentaries offer little help; neither I nor anyone I know has received a special revelation explaining the text. Let us simply agree to move on to other matters.

By this point in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus has started to speak openly about his impending death. He is moving inexorably toward Jerusalem; he has urged those who want to follow him to pick up their crosses and get moving. Exacting, unswerving discipleship seems to be what is needed most urgently. There is a mounting sense of expectation and tension surrounding Jesus’ next moves. Despite all of this. Jesus displays great generosity toward those at the fringes of his band of disciples, those who work powerfully in Jesus’ name but have not yet adopted the standard ways of affiliating with him. He seems eager to include these people among his band and he expects his followers to do likewise.

If, to use one of Jesus own analogies, the coming of the kingdom is like the start of a grand dinner party, then Jesus wants his followers to be like gracious hosts welcoming the guests. Of course, the best hosts draw their guests into a group and out of themselves, forming a sort of community. Jesus also has some fairly harsh warnings for those among his more established followers who set up roadblocks or checkpoints for "these little ones who believe in me.

Jesus neither needs nor wants bouncers guarding the door to the grand feast he is initiating. Nevertheless, Jesus is not blurring the lines between believers and unbelievers. Rather, he displays and commands a generous openness to those who believe in him and are doing powerful deeds in his name, yet for reasons undefined have not joined the main body of disciples.

Perhaps Jesus is too hopeful, too optimistic about these outsiders to suit our temperament. For in our most public gestures and pronouncements Christians in this country rarely display this sort of generosity toward each other. The desires to exclude and separate generally overwhelm the desire to draw in.

Such an observation is typically countered by the claim that rather than excluding and separating from their brothers and sisters, these believers are simply addressing the overt and insufficiently acknowledged sinfulness of the church. In the face of similar failings among his followers, Jesus himself is neither indifferent nor silent.

This seems to be a valid point. In the final words of his epistle James has something to say about this. Those who have read this far in James know that he is hardly soft on sin. James outlines both the sources and motives of strife among believers. He has unequivocally asserted the interconnection between Christian believing and Christian practice. He has castigated the rich, the verbose, the hypocrites and the self-sufficient, who seek to conduct their affairs outside the scope of God’s providential care. It is as if James prophetically anticipated the advent of the modern wealthy theology professor.

It is abundantly clear to me that having expertly probed all of my own most deep-seated sins, James is hardly indifferent to believers’ tendencies to wander into sin. It is important to recognize, though, that he is not eager to exclude believers when they do wander into sin. Rather, the final (and most important) task for believers is to bring back those who wander into sin. This is the perfect complement to the generosity displayed by Jesus in the reading from Mark. The aim of Jesus’ generosity toward those on the margins of the group seems to be to draw them in closer. Once drawn by the generosity of Jesus inside the circle of disciples, believers must not allow each other to wander away.

James will not let believers write each other off. We cannot be indifferent to either our own sin or the sin of others. Further, James calls us to display a profound level of compassion for our sisters and brothers in Christ. Should believers wander into any of the sins James has incisively analyzed in the body of his letter, it falls to their sisters and brothers to seek them out and turn them around. Indeed, James suggests that absent our seeking them out, the salvation of the wandering brother or sister is at stake. The degree to which James imagines believers to be dependent upon each other is staggering. Nevertheless, success in this venture "will cover a multitude of sins."

As with the generosity displayed by Jesus, the compassion James desires believers to show to each other stands in sharp contrast to the ways contemporary Christians typically behave toward each other in public. It is much more common to see believers separating themselves from each other because of real or perceived sinfulness. Smug indifference and indignant divisiveness are far more common than compassionate pursuit of our brothers and sisters.

Does James really mean for our pursuit of sinful brothers and sisters to persist indefinitely? Surely there must be some end point. There must be some point at which compassion must give way in the face of a willed refusal to return from one’s wanderings. James, who in so many respects offers pragmatic Christian wisdom, gives no answer to such a question. His final words throw us into a situation in which the state of our souls depends on the compassion of our fellow believers, who seek us out when we wander into sin and restore us to fellowship, covering a multitude of sins.