Hilton Head Island, SC – March 31, 2019
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 12:18-27; Mark 14:3-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Jesus said to them, “Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?” – Mark 12:24 (RSV)
This is the third in a series of six sermons based on the account of Holy Week in the Gospel of Mark. Today we are contemplating “The Confrontational Jesus.”
To understand the nature of Jesus’ many skirmishes with his theological enemies during his public ministry, we need first to think about the innate nature of theological conservatives and theological liberals. Theological conservatives, or for that matter, nearly all conservatives, are resistant to change. What has long worked smoothly in any organization or institution is resisted by conservatives, simply because the old seems to be tried and true, and has operated so well for so long. The continuation of tradition is thus of high importance to conservatives. That grand old man of stage and screen, Tevya, the milkman of the Russian Jewish village of Anatevka, loudly proclaims tradition in the song of that title from Fiddler on the Roof.
“On the other hand” (also to use one of Tevya’s favorite expressions), liberals are more open to change, and are far more likely to promote change as a way to improve institutions and organizations. Liberals tend to be more inclusive, while conservatives tend to be exclusive. There are many more facets to a conservative/liberal discussion, but these are a few examples.
For his time, Jesus of Nazareth was not just a liberal, but a radical liberal. He wanted to reform the religion of the Jews in a major way. Because that was so, he had major theological disputes with most of the leaders of first-century normative Judaism.
The most frequently mentioned of those disputes centered on the Mosaic law. From Exodus through Deuteronomy there are over six hundred separate laws. They cover almost everything in the secular and religious lives of people for centuries before the time of Jesus. The conservatives of Jesus’ day believed it was necessary to follow exactly what the Bible said about all of those laws, although everyone agreed that some laws, such as the Ten Commandments, were more important than others. Jesus believed that an inflexibly strict interpretation of biblical laws was a serious misunderstanding of the Bible’s intent.
For instance, Jesus had the power to heal people of various diseases, physical impairments, and mental imbalances. The law of Moses said God told the Israelites they must not work on the Sabbath. But what constituted work? Was it work for a farmer to feed his livestock on the Sabbath, or to milk his cows or goats? That was okay, said the experts in religious law, because animals had to be milked. But farmers must not work in the fields. When Jesus encountered someone needing his healing assistance on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, he used his powers to restore that person to wholeness. That was work, said the ultra-conservatives, and was forbidden.
According to all four Gospels, Jesus confronted theological conservatives and was confronted by them frequently throughout his public ministry. Some of the strongest disagreements occurred during the four days after the episode in the temple, when Jesus visibly and strongly attacked the fundamental rationale for the Jerusalem temple which had evolved through the centuries. Nevertheless, Jesus did not physically attack any individuals. By far the largest group of Jewish religious officials in the first century were the temple priests. Every male who was a descendant of the tribe of Levi or was a descendant of Moses’ brother Aaron was by virtue of birth a priest. So there were literally thousands of priests throughout Judea who went to Jerusalem on a rotating basis to sacrifice animals in the temple.
To read the Gospels, however, the primary adversaries of Jesus seem to have been the men who are identified as Pharisees. The term “scribes and Pharisees” is often lumped together as the people with whom Jesus most frequently locked horns. Scribes were people who physically hand-wrote copies of the books of the Old Testament, but especially the first five books, called “The Torah,” The Law. In addition, they wrote commentaries on the many Mosaic laws, and how each law should be applied.
Pharisees, surprisingly, were the most liberal of the first-century Jewish religious groups, or “parties” as they are sometimes called by New Testament scholars. It is almost like talking about political parties, except that they were involved in religious politics, not secular politics. (If you think there is no politics in religion, that just means you haven’t been involved in institutional religion very much.) The group known as the Herodians openly favored accommodation with Rome, as did the Sadducees, although to a lesser extent. The great majority of Jewish peasants were not affiliated with any of these educated groups, if only because they were not educated.
But to return to the Pharisees, they were the liberals of the first half of the first century in Judea. Some scholars believe Jesus was a Pharisee, and I tend to believe that myself. Why then do the Gospels so frequently assert that Jesus and the Pharisees fought so many verbal battles?
My answer to that question is one I have never read in any New Testament commentary. For whatever it is worth, which may be nothing, here it is: Three and perhaps all four of the Gospels were written after the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple by the Romans in 70 AD. Not only that, but by then the great majority of late first-century Christians were Gentiles, not Jews. They, apparently including the Gospel writers, knew little or nothing of the arguments between Jesus and the leaders of mainstream Judaism. They thought he battled with all of them. My guess is that the Pharisees were among Jesus’ only friends in the Jewish establishment, but the Gospels writers were not aware of that. To them the Pharisees were like all other Jewish leaders.
Between 70 and 100 AD, many Christians had concluded that all Jews were lost somewhere out in right field. Not left field, but right field, to use contemporary conservative/liberal nomenclature. That may explain how there is still so much anti-Jewish sentiment among many contemporary Christians.
To return briefly to the Pharisees in this teaching sermon, without them there would be no twenty-first century Judaism. They foresaw what no other early-first-century Jews perceived, namely, that if there was no temple (which they correctly anticipated), there had to be an alternative physical location for Jewish worship. That was provided by the synagogue, a Greek word Jews used to describe Jewish houses of worship that could be located anywhere, and not just in Jerusalem. After all, the Romans had completely leveled Jerusalem and the temple. In fact, many Reform Jews today refer to their synagogues as “temples.” It illustrates liberal linguistics.
Jesus was certainly not anti-Jewish, although many first-century Jewish Christians became anti-Jewish. Jesus wanted to reform Judaism, not to leave it. He had no intention of founding an entirely new anti-Jewish or extra-Jewish religion. (This requires a great deal of attention to many new ideas, I admit. I commend you for hanging in here, and I urge you to continue.) But now we are going to look at two passages from the Gospel of Mark, and it will get easier. I think.
Three weeks ago I referred to a confrontational parable by which Jesus laid out most of the first-century Jewish leaders in lavender. Not the Jews, but most of the Jewish religious leadership. Two weeks ago we looked at two incidents in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of Mark where Jesus escaped verbal traps those same leaders tried to set for him.
Now we shall look at a brouhaha that Jesus had with the Sadducees. Sadducees were a small group of wealthy and influential priests. To make a distinction with an important difference, not all priests were Sadducees, but all Sadducees were priests. Furthermore, Sadducees were the crème de la crème of priests. They were the most wealthy and powerful priests in Israel.
In addition, the Sadducees did not believe in what had come to be called “the resurrection,” meaning life after death. They believed that when people died, they were simply dead, and that was the end of it. The Pharisees, on the other hand, did believe in the resurrection to eternal life. If this seems similar to some of the differences which Christian conservatives and liberals have, it is. There will always be conservatives and liberals in every important matter known to the human race; that will never change. To some extent, most of us always tend basically in one direction or the other. Some of us change over time. A few of us change enormously over a lifetime, bouncing from one thing to another. However, most of us generally live on the one path or the other, or, depending on your point of view, in one rut or the other.
Belief in the resurrection was a liberal notion in the first century. The Sadducees rejected it as a radical notion that could not be supported from the Hebrew scriptures. Like the scribes, they also were strict observers of the religious law. That is a conservative notion in any century.
In order to set a theological trap for Jesus, the Sadducees referred to a religious law that seems bizarre to Christians. They said to Jesus, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife but no child, the man must take the wife and raise up children for the dead brother” (Mark 12:19). (I would note, parenthetically, that many contemporary Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditionalists and conservatives, especially of the male persuasion, believe that it is a man’s duty to procreate, producing as many children as possible. Demographics change through time, but mindsets and hormones are much slower to keep pace.)
“So,” said the Sadducees to Jesus, “there were seven brothers; the first took a wife, and when he died, she had no children; and the second took her and died, having no children, and the third likewise; none of the seven brothers left had any children by this unfortunate wife. Last of all the woman also died.” Therefore the Sadducees unctuously asked Jesus, “In the resurrection, whose wife will she be? For all seven of the brothers had her as wife.”
Do you get it? Here are the Sadducees, theological adversaries of the Pharisees, and (perhaps) of Jesus the Pharisee, and they have concocted a story to confound the very notion of the resurrection! Resurrections don’t happen, the Sadducees imply. In a few days the followers of Jesus will become convinced that he was resurrected from the tomb, but for now it appears that the Sadducees have forced Jesus into an inescapable theological cul-de-sac.
Except that they didn’t. “You dunderheads,” Jesus thunders, or words similar to that; “Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the scriptures nor the power of God?” (12:24) Nobody is married in heaven, says Jesus; everyone there is like an angel --- whatever that means. Whatever it means, I have always taken this verse at face value, which may even mean that I take it literally, which greatly surprises me about me. Nobody in heaven will have the same relationships we had on earth. If your father died at age 46 and you shall die at age 96, does that mean you will be fifty years older than he is in heaven? No! If you were married three times and were widowed three times, like my Aunt Sylvia, does that mean you will have three husbands in heaven? If your child died at age eight, are you going to have an eight-year-old in heaven? Of course not! The resurrection isn’t like that at all! What are you, theologically obtuse?
But you can’t say something like that as strongly as that and not get into trouble! Jesus took on the most powerful priests of the Jews and made them look like ignoramuses! You can’t do that! Back then, if you did it, potentially you would hasten your own execution. Even now, in the most conservative Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious circles, to say things like that to people like that is to commit ecclesiastical or religious suicide. And that is exactly what Jesus did on Palm Sunday and Holy Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. He seemed to go out of his way to pick fights, and he knew exactly where it was leading him.
Clearly Jesus believed the fights were necessary. No fists were flung, no weapons were used, but words clashed with words, thoughts with thoughts, and Good Friday drew eve r closer.
Then a poignant, beautiful, memorable thing happened. Mark says that Jesus was in the home of a man identified as Simon the leper (Mk. 14:3-9). A woman came in and poured a jar of nard over Jesus’ head. Nard was a very expensive medicinal ointment. Some of the people who saw this extraordinary action derided the woman for her extravagance. She should have taken the money she spent on the nard and given it to the poor, they said. Jesus commended her for what she did. “She has anointed my body beforehand for burial.” He knew he would soon be crucified, and within two days, he was nailed to a cross.
Matthew tells virtually the same story (Mt. 26:6-13). Luke tells a similar story, but with differing important details. First of all, Luke has this event taking place much earlier somewhere in the Galilee, and not in Jerusalem during Holy Week. And the woman in the Luke version is a widely-recognized prostitute, not just a woman. Jesus forgives her sins. Jesus’ theological enemies whisper among themselves that Jesus could not be a holy man if he didn’t recognize who she was. John, as usual, gives the story his own unique twist. The event occurs on Palm Sunday, before the processional into Jerusalem. The woman who anoints Jesus is Mary, the sister of Jesus’ friends Martha and Lazarus. The one who attacks her for her extravagance is Judas Iscariot.
All four Gospel versions of this story make similar points, but each writer presents the story in his own way. With the exception of Luke, the point is this: Jesus thanked the woman, whoever she was, for anointing his body for burial before the crucifixion. Symbolically, she had unknowingly declared that Jesus was about to die. He knew that, even if she and his disciples apparently were totally unaware of that tragic impending fact.
The confrontational Jesus was intentionally confrontational. He wanted to make sure his theological points were clearly understood. He knew that by doing that, in effect he was writing his own death warrant. He did not want to die, nor intend to die, but he was willing to die for his radical and revolutionary ideas. In order for the kingdom of God to be properly established, there had to be a new way of perceiving who God is and what He wants of us. Jesus of Nazareth was the courageous proclaimer of a radically new form of Good News.
Thus, in the next four days, according to Mark’s Gospel, Jesus became the Apocalyptic Jesus, then the Triumphant Jesus, and finally, on Easter, the Enigmatic Jesus. He knew what he was doing, Christian people. He knew exactly what he was doing. Rejoice, the Lord is King!