Freedom and Gratitude
Twenty-Second Sunday after Pentecost, October 24, 2021
Jeremiah 31:7-9 • Hebrews 7:23-28 • Mark 10:46-52
When Jeremiah spoke comfort to his people, he was casting them a vision for a future of freedom and return. Israel, the Northern Kingdom, had long been separated from their southern neighbors, the Kingdom of Judah. In 722 BCE, some two hundred years before Judah would fall to the Babylonians, Israel was taken into Assyria. The loss of the northern house of God’s chosen people was a cause of great suffering and sadness. Of the twelve tribes, eight were lost into the Neo-Assyrian empire.
In 567 BCE, we all know what happens: the Babylonians rise to power in the region and make their move against the remaining Jewish state, the House of Judah. The Babylonian captivity will last just seventy years, but it will see the destruction of Jerusalem, the desecration of the Temple, the dismantling of the Judean political system.
This should not have come as a shock. Elisha, Elijah, Amos, and Obadiah had been prophesying about the Assyrian invasion for more than a hundred years, calling on the people of God to remember their covenant, to honor their commitment to YHWH and to each other. No sooner had the Northern Kingdom fallen, than a new generation of prophets began to preach to the people about the Babylonian threat. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Joel prophesy about terrifying events, portents of destruction that will shake the very soul of Jerusalem and the House of Judah.
Whoever the prophet, whatever the time, the message is the same: The Hebrew people were granted Canaan and blessed with a homeland. All they had to do was to follow the covenant – serve one God; don’t intermarry outside the family of Israel; take care of the widows and the orphans. This shouldn’t be so difficult to achieve, but over and over again, the people stray, prophets call them back, they ignore the advice.
Through the Jeremiah school of prophecy, we see the whole story of the coming destruction of Jerusalem, the Exile in Babylon, and now, in its later writing, the prophetic tradition of Jeremiah predicts return and rejoicing. To the faithful remnant, he promises reunification. The north will rejoin, the children will return, refreshed by cool rivers, ready to reengage in the work of rebuilding, reforming, rejoicing. Freedom and gratitude. The shackles of bondage will be broken, the covenant restored, peace and security will return to the land.
This is not just about the land. Without a Temple, Jewish life is greatly disrupted. The annual Day of Atonement, the rolling back of sin, can’t happen without a Temple. For seventy years the faithful have been unforgiven, the Scrolls of Torah have been rolled up and unread. Imagine the burden you would feel with seventy years of sin and no way to remove it! Put yourself in a place where you are cut off from the living word of YHWH, the Torah silent, written only on your heart but not on your lips or ears. Now imagine the freedom and the gratitude you would feel when once again the rites can be performed, the law read, the stories told anew. Freedom and gratitude.
For returning Judeans, they got to work rebuilding the walls, the Temple, life in Jerusalem. Ezra and Nehemiah would guide them through this work, and it would take a generation of labor, but the fortunes of Zion were restored.
... Until they weren’t.
There were roughly five hundred years between the return from Babylonian Exile and the birth of Jesus. In that time, as before, the people strayed from their covenant, and prophets were called up to guide them. Nahum, Habakkuk tried to gently guide them; Ezekiel, Zephaniah, Malachi were less kind and more to the point. Get right, or get ready, was the message.
We are more familiar with this part of the story because we tell it as we learn about the life into which Jesus will be born. The political and religious structure before the Common Era had become so corrupt that the treasury was an open account for Herod and his kin. The Temple priests invited prostitutes, salespeople, and those infamous money changers into the forecourts. They were charging money for sacrifices necessary for worship and forgiveness, exacting tax after tax on the faithful. And it wasn’t much better outside the Temple Mount or the royal palaces, sectarianism had created deep divisions in society, and a bifurcated nation with Galilee in the north and Judah in the south split by hostile Samaria made it difficult to observe the laws of racial and religious purity laid down in the Torah and promised in the Covenant.
Whether it is geopolitics or YHWH’s wrath that cause it, into this broken society Rome stepped, and this would be a domination and an occupation from which Jerusalem would never recover. With corruption, domination, oppression, and the burdens of the Greco-Roman honor-shame cycle, the people of Palestine were caught in a web of bondage, taxed and trapped in almost every area of life. If you’re paying attention to the story, it’s time for a prophet to show up.
Now, I am not dismissing the strength of Elijah’s preaching, or the tenderness of Amos’ yearning for justice. I am not in any way disparaging Hosea’s righteous anger or Isaiah’s poetic encouragement, but the prophet God sends into deal with the mess of Jerusalem in the First Century is one whom no foreign oppressor or corrupt power structure or illegitimate temple authority can ignore.
We hear of a prophet, God’s own son, who will encounter the demons of his day and cast them out, and as in today’s Gospel, he will restore sight to the blind. Meeting his people; family, friends, and strangers; those who welcome him and those who dismiss him, Jesus has compassion on them, and heals the sick, causes the deaf to hear, restores to society those banished for uncleanliness and disease, and he requires no promise, no covenant, no price.
And what is the response? Freedom and gratitude. The now-sighted man in today’s Gospel leaps up, runs to Jesus, and immediately expresses his gratitude by following him, by joining the movement. What a way to give thanks – to follow the healer on his journey to free the people of Palestine from the things that trap them.
We focus on the healing miracles, as they are described in the Gospel, but I wonder if we’re missing their metaphorical value? Within a narrative structure, like the Gospels, story is used to convey learning. In restoring the unwell and the unclean to society, in curing those on the fringes of society and bringing them back into their families and marketplaces, Jesus is doing much more than physical healing. He’s confronting class, race, religion – he is overturning the very systems of oppression and giving the people back their dignity. Jesus is threatening Empire, the largest, most destructive force that civilization has perpetuated.
How does Jesus call them to overturn and subvert Empire? He calls on them to share, as in the miracle of the loaves and the fishes; he calls on them to evangelize, as in the healing of the paralytic when a hole must be cut in the roof and people are climbing the trees to get a glimpse; he calls them to tells others and to follow him. Through these things it won’t just be lives that are changed, but hearts and minds, attitudes, actions.
And when people are freed from Empire, their gratitude and their desire to follow will last not just until the end of the chapter or until the end of an era, but two thousand years later, we’ll still be finding freedom and gratitude in this Good News.
And so, what of us, today’s followers of Jesus? How do we confront the corrupting forces around us? Signs of Empire abound, sin in which we engage and which is done on our behalf. We are melting the icecaps, we are caging children, we dismiss the starving, we are wringing gold from human pain.
And then we come here, to this place, this community made strong by our love for each other, and we heal, we cast out darkness, we feed the poor, we share what we have with those around us. You are miracles and miracle-makers, every one of you. You offer your gifts of time, talent, and treasure to our church, you share your wisdom and your experience with us to solve twenty-first century problems, you care for your neighbors.
We are beginning today our Stewardship Drive, our annual focus on the gifts we will make this year to support ministry in our congregation. It takes all of us, and all our gifts to make this place run – our ideas, our volunteer hours, our cooking and baking, our singing and praying, our financial gifts, our phone calls and zoom social hours, our love. Sharing. Such a simple concept. But do you know what sharing does? It dismantles Empire, it is so countercultural to give away instead of hoard, to recognize abundance instead of seek out scarcity, that it undermines the walls that have been built to keep us in or keep us out.
Rome was no match for Jesus, its death no match for the resurrecting power of God, and today’s empire? It’s no match for you. Keep doing what you’re doing. By sharing what you have you will heal the divisions of our nation, you will soothe the soul of our City, you will cast out the demons from our Democracy. And the people you help, whose lives you change, they will experience freedom and gratitude. You are the difference. You are the miracle. You are the Good News.