Prove it!

 

Sounds like Jesus was having a bad day.  First, he was tested by the Pharisees, then by the lack of foresight by his disciples.  He was speaking about faith and using a metaphor to do so, and his disciples completely missed the point and took his words literally.  Not only that, but they were coming from a very defensive position, assuming that he was blaming them for their lack of preparation.

Nobody was getting it.  The Pharisees wanted signs, the king wanted absolutes, the disciples wanted their bellies full and no one wanted to think about God or mission or higher purpose.  Here they were in the presence of Jesus, and had seen and experienced marvelous things, but all they could do was stay fixated on their own perceived needs and their own sense of what was proper.

Like a mobile, the three groups were used to a certain way of living.  Herod was used to having uncontested power over the country and influence with the Roman Empire.  He was a figurehead and knew it.  He was also plagued with guilt over the death of John the Baptist and wondered if Jesus was John reincarnated.  He had been manipulated by his wife and stepdaughter into executing John, from which we get the phrase, “serve his head on a platter”.  He was a dangerous and volatile man, easily swayed, and a wily politician.  He was not afraid to kill people to keep his power.

The Pharisees were, as Robbie the Dragon said, the ‘status quo’.  The religious people who ran the temple.  They were used to being upper managers in the institution of religion, which was a big thing in Jerusalem.  They liked their systems, their debates, their logic and their many rules. 

They liked the superiority they had in knowing that they had the truth all wrapped up and that they were better than the rest of the people they saw.  They were sure they were right.  They ‘knew’ they were in God’s good books.

Then there were the disciples.  Fishermen, farmers, day laborers.  They knew their place in the society’s hierarchy.  It was at the bottom.  They knew the constant struggle to find enough food to eat every day.  They knew grinding poverty, and they knew that they were not good enough to deserve the best seat in the temple.  Like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, they only dreamed of one day having a seat of honor in their most sacred institution.  Survival was the best they could hope for.

Imagine that this society was like a mobile with the strings and sticks balancing the different people at each level.  You remember the kinds we made with our kids as school projects, or maybe hung a store-bought one over a baby’s crib.  I had one festooned with plastic butterflies that entertained my children, especially when they realized the butterflies moved when they kicked their feet on the crib mattress.

The mobile that was the society of the people was committed to being still, calm and static.  It hadn’t been that long ago that there had been two nasty sieges of Jerusalem that had led to wholesale massacres of people hiding in the Temple, less than 100 years earlier.  Power imbalances had led to civil wars and thousands of people dead. So status quo and peace was very precious to all.  It was a matter of life and death.  People didn’t want more war, more death, and more disaster.  They wanted stability.  They wanted safety.  They wanted security.

Jesus wanted equality.  He wanted people to share their abundance with people who didn’t have abundance.  He wanted fair play and justice, so that poor people wouldn’t be the oppressed and the marginalized.  He wanted healthy community, where all, young and old, were treated with compassion and respect.  Where status was not based on what one owned or who one controlled, but on how well one served, and loved the people who could least repay a kindness.

He wanted a community that laughed together, played together, worked together and experienced God together. A community freed from the fear of not having enough or being enough.  A community of love and joy.

To get there would take much change.  The mobile would have to move and bounce and whirl to get that change.  Herod and the Pharisees were not having it.  They wanted the mobile to stay still and peaceful for them.  They were prepared to sacrifice the people under them to maintain that peace.  They certainly weren’t going to let some upstart Galilean preach to them how to practice their faith and upset the peaceful mobile.

So they demanded signs, not because they wanted signs, but because they wanted to keep the mobile from moving.  And Jesus realized the game they were playing.  Jesus realized they kept moving the goal post and would keep moving the goal post as a way to discredit him in front of his followers.

When he tried to communicate this to the disciples, once again, they didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.  They were fixated on their assumptions that there wasn’t enough food around because they could only believe in that which they could touch or taste.  They didn’t trust in this new community, they only trusted in what they knew.  They needed bread, not just once in a while but daily, like the rich folk could afford.  And that need was enough to erase their memories of the loaves and fishes that were in abundance whenever they met in community in the presence of Jesus.

Where do you find yourself in this story?  Are you worried about your daily bread? Are you worried about upsetting the status quo?  Are you stressed out about what other people might think if you do something different than everyone else?  Have you forgotten the special moments in your lives when you had a sense of community, of support, of the divine awe that inspired you and connected you to something bigger than yourself?

I hope amidst the challenges and the shifts of our world, that we remember to hold to the vision of a community and a society where all are valued, where all have found a bigger purpose to hope in, where all are committed to spinning the mobile until all know the joy and the glory of being beloved children of God.