Seventeenth Sunday
after Trinity
Lectionary readings: Esther
7:1-6, 9, 10; 9:20-22 and James 5:13-20 and Mark 9:38-50
Our Old Testament
reading today is taken from the Book of Esther. After the people of
Jerusalem were carried off into the Babylonian exile, and had lived as exiles
for some seventy years, they began to return home, in successive waves. However,
some chose not to uproot and return. The story of Esther concerns the Jewish
population that had made its home in Susa. It is a story that Jewish
congregations listen to, in one sitting, each year, as a kind of pantomime,
complete with a spoilt king; not one but two brave queens; a poor but wise
uncle; and a wicked villain who is booed each time he appears. It is a story of
a people saved from genocide; and it invites us to sit with the tension that
not every genocide is averted…
Our New Testament
reading today is taken from the Letter of James. In it, we are exhorted
to pray, at all times. When things are tough, pray. When things are going well,
pray. When someone among us is sick, pray. Because prayer, at least the prayer
of a righteous community, is powerful and effective. But not every prayer is
answered in the way that we hope for. And so, again, we are invited to sit with
tension, to accept complexity, to embrace and allow ourselves to be embraced by
mystery. To wrestle with the fact that every person in the Gospels who asks
Jesus for healing is healed; the fact that there is only one occasion when the
disciples were unable to deliver a boy from demonization, and even then Jesus
instructs them where they went wrong. Our understanding of unanswered prayer
must lie on the far side of this presentation of the gospel, not fall short of it.
Our Gospel reading
today is concerned with scandals in the Church—Greek, skandalizó, to
cause to stumble—and how to deal with them. The scandal that precipitates
Jesus’ teaching is that John informs Jesus that he saw a man driving out demons
in Jesus’ name and told him to stop, because he was not one of the Twelve. John
is clearly anticipating a reward but receives a rebuke instead. Jesus declares,
anyone who is not against us is for us. The scandal in question here is that
John was determined to exercise a simplistic understanding; to rule on who was
in and who was out—in such a way that maintained his own position and place of
influence. But Jesus will have none of it. Better for John and for the Church
that he be cut off than that he continue cutting others off.
The Eastern Orthodox
theologian Kallistos Ware wrote, “…it is not the task of Christianity to
provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a
mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our
wonder.”
Our readings this
morning are given not to provide easy answers but in order to inform our
awareness of a mystery. To encounter the God who is with us, in every
circumstance, whether joyful or sorrowful, often hidden from our sight by our determination
to be satisfied with the limits of what we can know or understand. And,
encountering this God, to find ourselves caught up in wonder, lost in worship.
Amen.
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