Love Like You Were Dying
Mark 3:1-6
Preached on November 11, 2007, by
The Rev. Dr. Brian K. Blount
“Jesus is coming again soon. And boy,...is he ticked!”
I can still remember my Aunt Francis’s open-mouthed expression as she stood transfixed by the dormitory room door where that bumper sticker was attached. She kept moving her lips, silently mouthing the words as if they might change miraculously before her lips finished forming them. Somehow, some way, by the time she concluded the first sentence, she was sure that her eyes would stop playing tricks on her and the wording of the second sentence would put the coming again Lord in a better mood or at least put the whole sentiment in more reverent language. She was blinking, trying to clear both her mind and her sight when she made one final reading effort, this time aloud. But amazingly, the words and the message remained the same.
“Aren’t all of these students in here going to be ministers?” she asked.
The dormitory was Brown Hall. At Princeton Theological Seminary. In 1979. The door guarded the entryway to a room on the second floor. I was just returning from summer recess to my second year of seminary where at least I, my aunt was praying, was in proper ministerial training. I could see the wary expression on her face, though, as she looked even me over one last time before heading to the stairwell that would take her and my parents to my parents’ car in the parking lot. She was no doubt pondering, “what kind of crazy saying is he going to have on his door once we drive away from this place?”
My Aunt Francis, you see, is a traditional Christian. The notion that Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Son of God, Jesus the Prince of Peace could be angry just doesn’t jive with the faith perspective of your average Christian. That same average Christian wouldn’t want her minister thinking such jive. Your average convert cannot comprehend that her celestially consecrated caretaker of the Christian community and its creeds could ever contend that Jesus could have been angry. About anything. And if the broken, twisted mind of some mad minister did think it, your average Christian would want that minister to keep such a thought to him or herself, or at the very least use a more Christian phrase like, “quite upset.” So why would a young man motivated to become a minister post such a jive thought on the door of his seminary training for all the passing world to see? Jesus wasn’t angry then. Jesus isn’t angry now. Jesus won’t be angry when he comes back. Jesus was always cool and calm. Okay, okay, . . . there was that one time when he cried. People will just not let him or the rest of us forget it. Jesus wept. Jesus wept. Jesus wept. Ask people for a Bible verse and the first thing that comes popping out is “Jesus wept.” I’ll bet when good Christian folk gather around the dinner table or in prayer groups and struggle to remember a Bible verse to share, nobody ever comes up with: “Jesus was ticked!!”
Mark gets as close as anybody to saying it. In fact, in Mark, you can feel emotion bubbling to a boil in Jesus right from the start. He’s in worship one Sabbath morning and, of all places, it’s here that he meets the first demon of his recorded ministry. Imagine that, finding a demon in church! Do you think that Mark is toying with us even as he introduces Jesus? Most Christians tend to think Jesus is nice even to bad people. But you’ll notice, he doesn’t pass the peace with this demon. In church, where everybody is presumably welcome, Jesus essentially says, “shut up and get out.”
Later on, when religious leaders point out that Jesus is eating and drinking with the wrong kinds of people, Jesus essentially tells them, “you’re the wrong kind of people.” I wasn’t sent to hang around with you “good” people. Where I go, God goes. And since I’m not with you, God is not with you. God is over here with me and the tax collectors and prostitutes.
It’s no wonder that on what is just his second day on the job proclaiming that the Reign of God is at hand that the scribal authorities want to shut his ministry down. They lay traps for him left and right. Why don’t your disciples fast? Why do you let your disciples work on the Sabbath? With all of this on his heart, on his mind, and no doubt on his last nerve, Jesus comes once more to the synagogue for Sabbath worship. You remember what happened the last time he went to worship, right? The head greeter was a demon. This time Jesus is greeted by a man with a withered hand. The second thing he sees is a crowd of people waiting to see what he’s going to do with this man with the withered hand. Everybody knows that to perform such a healing on the Sabbath would be unlawful. It would be considered work. Only emergency or life saving work was allowed on the Sabbath. So, “what is Jesus going to do?”
Before he does anything, he gets angry. The word Mark uses to describe Jesus’ anger is the same word John the Baptist uses in Matthew and Luke to talk about God’s coming wrath. It is the word Paul uses to talk about the wrath of God against all wickedness. It is the same word that John uses in the book of Revelation to say that those who worship the beast and receive its mark will drink the undiluted wine of God’s wrath. You use this word you’re not playing around; the person you describe with this word is not playing around. Jesus, my fellow average Christians, is ticked.
Why is Jesus so angry? The answer, incredibly enough, can be found in the lyrics of a country and western song: “Live Like You Were Dying,” by Tim McGraw. For those of you who haven’t heard it, it’s about a man who finds out he’s dying. There’s a poignant moment of question and answer in it. “I asked him,” the song’s narrator says, “when it sank in, that this might really be the real end? How's it hit 'cha when you get that kind of news? Man what did ya do?”
“He said:
I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'
If we only had a short time to live, and we knew it, I think we’d want to live our lives doing things that mattered, that seem powerfully important to us, and, one would hope, to God and others.
In the back woods of Galilee one day, Jesus gets some similarly disturbing news. Not from a doctor, but from God. He’s dying. Already, at the end of our scripture, the Pharisees and Herodians are plotting to kill him. But the world he’s living in is dying, too! That’s why he starts his ministry with the famous words: The Reign of God is at hand. The end is about to begin. Everybody ought to be living like their world is dying. God’s new heaven and new earth is coming to take its place.
Their “good” news is our “good” news. So, like the narrator in Tim McGraw’s song, I ask you: “How's it hit 'cha when you get that kind of news? Man what do you do?” Looking at a man with a withered hand on the one side, the Sabbath law that said he could not heal him on the other side, and a whole slew of hostile scribes waiting to see his next move on the backside, Jesus decided to love like he was dying. A radical time calls for a radical love. It is this radical love that triggers Jesus’ anger. A man who loves like the world is dying gets angry when that dying world tries to take innocent people with it.
Most of us love scared. We love, but often as if we’re afraid to love too much. True love makes you crazy. True love is like that old Percy Sledge song, When a Man Loves a Woman. “When a Man Loves a Woman, he can’t keep his mind on nothin’ else. He’d trade the world for the good thing he’s found. If she is bad, he can’t see it. Turn his back on his best friend if he puts her down. When a Man loves a woman, he’d spend his very last dime trying to hold on to what he needs. He’d give up all of his comforts and sleep out in the rain, if she say that’s the way it ought to be.” Anybody in here love anybody, any cause, any God like that?
I have an idea. Let’s rewrite Percy’s song and put it to the music of discipleship. When a Christian loves another Christian, she’ll push him to reach out and grab hold of people and communities that are withering away from lack of care and resources. When a Christian loves another human, any human in need, anywhere he finds that need, he breaks through the laws and customs that separate him from such need and does what he can, uses whatever resources he can find, to change the circumstances that sustain and multiply that need. When a Christian loves a withering world, she’ll grab hold of the shriveled hands of people she’s not supposed to touch and take up unpopular causes people like her are not supposed to take up. When a Christian loves like Jesus loved, he’ll give up his comforts and sleep out in the desperate places where hopelessness pours down like a driving rain, if God says that’s the way it ought to be.
People don’t have withered hands because they want them. In Jesus’ world, there were demonic forces and powers that threw illnesses at people the way humans today throw harsh words, economic policies, administrative rules, political positions, knives, and bullets. People don’t have poverty because they want it. People don’t have zero health insurance because they want it. People don’t have lives locked away from a decent education because they want it. Those things are thrust upon some people and heaped upon them because it makes society and life better, wealthier, and happier for other people. That’s why Jesus got angry.
Wanna know why we’re not angry? We average Christians don’t really know who or what Jesus really was. We are shocked, shocked, I tell you, when New Testament scholars point out that Jesus was an incredibly polarizing figure who went about, as he did in our story, picking fights. Read the gospels yourself. Jesus agitates. This story about the man with the withered hand is not an exception. He didn’t have to heal that man on the Sabbath. This was no emergency, life-threatening trauma that had to be triaged on the spot. He could have worked this healing on the day after the sabbath. Please everyone. Made friends of people with withered hands and scribes of the Pharisees alike. But, no . . . he had to do it his way. He had to use the Sabbath that was set aside exclusively for God, to help one of God’s people. And I say again, this kind of defiance is not an exception. So, most of the time when Jesus heals, he ends up making at least half the crowd mad at him. We desperately want to believe he was a conciliatory Mr. Rogers kind of guy donning his nicely knit sweater and preaching the coming of God’s gentle neighborhood. Most people think that if Jesus were here today, in the U.S., in this polarized country of red states and blue states, he’d be something like a current political figure who says that instead of being red or blue, he wants to be a more compromising, conciliatory purple. That’s what being Christian is all about, isn’t it? Being purple. A purple person in Pharisaic Palestine would have performed that healing feat on the following day so as to not get anybody upset. The thing is, purple is also the color of a bruise. Jesus was crucified because he took a side, the wrong side, and he ended up bruised and dressed up in a so-called royal purple by the mocking Romans because the people on the side of law and order, wealth and power tried to beat and crucify him out of the world order they thought they had established. Wherever there was wealth, he took the side of poverty. Wherever there was power, he took the side of weakness. Wherever there was condemnation, he took the side of the condemned. Wherever there was brokenness, he took the side of healing, even if he had to break laws to make that healing work.
Is that the Jesus we recognize? When I was growing up, our church had this custom of Easter Lilies. On Easter Sunday morning, thinking of resurrection, we would plaster the pulpit with lilies in the memory of loved ones who had died. Well, around 10 years old, I got this idea to put a lily up on the pulpit in memory of Jesus. During those devilish elementary school years, I was somewhat of a Sunday School agitator. I was a teacher’s pet kind of student in regular school, but for some reason I took this almost evil glee in provoking my Sunday School teachers. I was even thrown out of Sunday School once. I left that little tidbit out of my personal statement when I applied to Seminary. I was expelled for debating my Sunday School teacher on the matter of whether the Bible covered every possible situation a person could ever face. For some reason, in the fifth grade, I was annoyed that someone would make such a claim that any written text from the past could respond to every human situation that every human would ever face in the future. I wasn’t thinking of complex arguments like: “that’s why we have the Holy Spirit, to help us where past written texts don’t.” I wasn’t even thinking of things like abortion or blood transfusions or cloning, which are incredible ethical quandaries that the Bible doesn’t directly address. I wanted to know what the Bible had to say on the matter of helicopters. Were helicopters addressed in the Bible? No? Well, how can you say the Bible addresses everything? That’s the moment when I was kicked out of Sunday School. It was this same kind of devilish spirit that led me to want to buy a lily and put on it: “in memory of Jesus.” Since all those other dead people were being remembered, why couldn’t Jesus be remembered too? After all, wasn’t it HIS church?
So, there’s this lily up on the pulpit with Jesus’ name on it, and when the pastor goes about reading names, he gets to this one, and starts to read it, stops, and then says, there must be a mistake, and then goes on to the next one. Somehow, the person and idea of Jesus just doesn’t fit in with the concept of death. After all, he’d risen above death. So, my pastor never read “in memory of Jesus.” I think the church is as flummoxed about the memory of Jesus as my pastor was that Sunday morning. We don’t really ever look at Jesus, we kind of glance sideways at him, and figure out that we know already what he was about, so we really don’t need to read what he was about. He is God with us, this man who left us, a corpse on a cross. He was the Prince of Peace, this man who said he came not to bring peace, but a sword. He is love, this man who hated injustice. He is all-forgiving, this man who said that for some eternity will be a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. He is the man who walks with us in the garden of serenity, this man whose last garden walk was so tormented that the author of Hebrews said he sweated drops of blood. When the real Jesus comes up before us on the slips of paper we call the gospel narratives, we don’t know what to make of him. We stumble and bumble around him. We refuse to recognize just how polarizing he was, just how polarizing he intended to be. It was no accident. He was intentional. Because he loved like he was dying, he couldn’t help himself. A man who has that kind of love inside can’t help but let it out even when he knows it’s going to get him into trouble. And that’s why, torn up inside by love, angered by inaction, he says to the man with the withered limb on the Sabbath day when withered limbs were by the mandate of the law supposed to remain withered, “stretch out your arm.” Jesus got angry!!
If anything, the conditions in our law abiding world are worse than they were in his. There are wars and rumors of more wars. The laws of engagement tell us to sit it out, to not add to the fighting by fighting for peace. Jesus got angry!!
There are holocausts of famine, civil war, and disease in Africa, Europe, Asia, and right here in North America that bring to mind the most gruesome of the plagues depicted in the Book of Revelation. The laws of distance tell us that the people caught up in such circumstances are too far away for us to make a difference so the best we can do is pray that somebody closer can find a way of healing their wounds and transforming their world. Jesus got angry!!
In our own country, millions of people seek out jobs and homes because they believe there is no hope for the economic future in their own country. The laws of immigration tell us that those of us who by the grace of God didn’t have to do a thing but be born here have not just the right but the obligation to remove those who haven’t earned their right to be here. Jesus got angry!!
We have thousands upon thousands of teenagers dropping out of high schools and dropping into prison in this country at epidemic rates. The laws of “take care of my own” tell me that it’s not my problem as long as my children graduate, go to college, find a decent job, and live a long, happy life. Jesus got angry!!
The gap between the wealthiest and poorest Americans widens everyday at rates so alarming that some social critics say that the massing of the majority of the country’s wealth in the hands of a very, very few is at a level unseen since the days of the great robber barons. Some laws of economics say “don’t worry,” because such wealth will eventually trickle down to the average citizen. Jesus got angry!!
The singer, Bono, suggested at a National Prayer breakfast before the President and both liberal and conservative members of Congress recently that in light of the severe economic imbalances across the world that the U.S. could tithe 1 percent of its wealth to transforming poverty. The idea apparently blew out like a candle in a stiff wind. Jesus got angry!!
That anger motivated Jesus to act in ways that changed not only a man’s arm but also a part of the world that was withering all around him. How deep is your love? I tell you truly, there is a withered man in each and every one of our average Christian lives. When we one day face him and face the people and circumstances who prefer the order of their lives and world to the chaos that trying to heal him might cause, what will we do? How much will we love?
The Jesus who loves us so fiercely is coming again soon. And, no, he is not upset . . . or put out . . . or somewhat frustrated . . . or mildly irritated. Jesus is angry. Don’t you think it’s about time we got angry too?
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