This is a short yet mighty passage, full
of depth out of proportion to its length. It is also a saying of a certain species, a certain kind: it's a Wisdom saying,
so-called because it offers wisdom for daily living, how to live daily in the
light of the Divine Living One. Of course, in our Christian faith, this means
living in God through God's Son Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
But the Wisdom tradition long predates
Christianity: there were Wisdom schools throughout the ancient Middle East.
Perhaps the preeminent such school was in Babylon, where the Israelites were
exiled for forty years, from 586 to 546 B.C. During that time, they were
exposed to this Wisdom school, and out of that contact came what Biblical
scholars call Wisdom literature, embodied in our Scripture by Proverbs, Job,
Ecclesiastes, and some of the later psalms. They tend to be works of a more
philosophical and mystical nature, in contrast to the more action- and
ethics-oriented bent of earlier Israelite writing.
Listen to a typical Wisdom saying, this
one from Proverbs: “My child, if you accept my words and treasure up my
commandments within you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your
heart to understanding; if you indeed cry out for insight, and raise your voice
for understanding; if you seek it like silver, and search for it as for hidden
treasures—then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge
of God.” And it sounds
like a pretty straightforward "if-then" proposition, albeit in poetic
terms: if you listen to my words, really listen
then everything will be ok. But then you start to think about it, and it opens
up like a flower of infinite possibility: what does the author mean by
"accept and treasure" his or her words? And why--and, more
importantly, how--should
one "search for it like hidden treasures?" Isn't it right there,
coming out of his or her mouth, written down on paper? And what the heck does
“understanding the fear of the Lord” even mean,
anyway?
And that's the way it is with the saying
of Jesus we just read. On the surface, it appears to be just an "if you do
good things, then you'll get rewarded" kind of deal. But if you dig into
it, if you burrow down and really think
about it, that interpretation falls apart, or at least it's shown to only
scratch the surface. it begins with a statement establishing Jesus' lineage:
“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who
sent me." It does s several things. First, it sets up the notion of
”welcome“ as the theme of the saying, conjuring up images of a householder or
innkeeper, standing at their door with a smile on their face. In other words, the
first thought is that it's about hospitality, and that's fine, because
hospitality is a major theme in Scripture.
The next thing the opening sentence does
is it establishes the authority of whomever Jesus is talking to: whoever
welcomes you welcomes me. And to whom is Jesus talking? Why, the twelve, his
original disciples: this is the last part of the instruction he gives them as
he's sent them out. Whoever welcomes you welcomes me . . . in some mysterious
way, beyond mere representation, y'all are expressions of me. Later in
Matthew's Gospel, he expands it to the poor and marginal, saying whatever
you've done to the least of these you've done to me.
Finally, the opening establishes his own
relationship to the Divine: whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.
And if a similar relationship holds between the one who sent him--presumably,
of course, God--as between Jesus and his disciples, then in some mysterious
way, Jesus is an expression of the Divine (Remember, this was written centuries
before the notion of the Trinity took shape.) And these kind of
"chain" sayings, evoking serial relationships, are very important in
the Gospels, as members of our Bible study on John can attest. Sometimes it
seems that that
Gospel is one chain-statement after another.
So it's a saying about welcome, already, and in
typical literary fashion, Jesus goes from the general to the specific, using a
modification of the chain-statement do do it: “Whoever welcomes a prophet in
the name of a prophet will receive a prophet’s reward; and whoever welcomes a
righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of
the righteous." And this is where it starts to get a little weird. Because
on the surface it looks great: whoever welcomes prophets and the righteous in
their names will get prophets' and righteous folks' rewards, but then you stop
and think: is that really
so wonderful? Because prophets aren't always treated so great, are they?
Especially these days, when they get shot up with Thorazine and tucked away
where the sun don't shine.
But even back in the day, when folks
generally believed
in such things, prophets often ended up on the short end of the stick. Just
look at what happened to John the Baptist, Jesus' predecessor as Prophet-in-Chief: his head was
served up at Herod's feast on a platter. Come to think of it, Jesus himself,
whom Christians believe is the prophet to end all prophets, ends up spiked to a
tree for his trouble. And now we're beginning to get the idea: far from
painting a rosy picture about what it means
that we in some ways are identified with Christ, it's beginning to look like a
decidedly mixed bag: if you take on this authority--and do Christians have any
choice?--if you take on this authority, watch out. That cup from which Jesus drinks
you shall indeed drink.
Ditto with the righteous: religious
persecution has always been a fact of life for them, no matter what their
flavor of faith might be. Spreading righteousness often goes against the status
quo, upsets he apple cart . . . Look at what's happening now, with Muslims and
Christians persecuting one another; the continual, sporadic persecution of
Jews; and the ongoing, violent persecution of Buddhists by various governments
in the Far East. And of course, once again for Christians, the model of the
persecuted righteous one is one Jesus Christ of Nazareth.
So, far from being a straightforward
"if you do good you get good" kind of deal, it seems to be a reminder
to the disciples, at the conclusion of their sending-out, just what might happen
to them if they are faithful to their call. Those who give hospitality to
prophets and the righteous will be tagged as one of them, will do so in their
name. If you think this is gonna be a walk in the park, Jesus seems to be
saying, you are sadly mistaken.
But now we come to the third
admonition--these things come in threes, you know--and suddenly, the pattern is
broken. "Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little
ones in the name of a disciple—truly I tell you, none of these will lose their
reward.” Anyone who does even
the slightest good deed to one of these little ones . . . You don't
even have to go so far as welcome them, to invite them into your house for
dinner or for milk and cookies, just give them a little water . . . Folks who
do that won't lose
their reward.
Jesus goes from prophets to the
righteous, and for the third, crowning example, we might expect somebody even more upstanding,
"Whosoever welcomes holy ones" or something, but what we get are
"little ones," and there are several possibilities as to whom Jesus
means by this . . . Most link it to the "least of these" later in
Matthew, where the King says "whatever you've done to the least of these,
you've done to me." In this scenario, the "little ones" are the
poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable. They are little, like
children--arguably the most
vulnerable in ancient society--and like that King, Jesus is giving special
praise to folks who serve them: people who do that won't lose their reward.
But what if Jesus really is going up the
ladder of "worthiness," from prophets--pretty good--to the
righteous--really good--to little ones--the best? What would make the
"little ones" greater than the others? Well, let's remember that this
is a Wisdom saying, and in Wisdom literature, childlike qualities are considered to
be desirable . . . Recall that a bit later on in Matthew, Jesus tells
disgruntled disciples that the kingdom belongs to little children "such as
these," and in Wisdom circles it's not their naïveté that is desirable,
although they may be that, or their innocence, although they may be that as well, but their
closeness to the Source, unity with the creator, a state they were in once, and
one to which they will return.
Take newborns. They are completely
unable to tell the difference between themselves and anything or anybody else.
They haven't learned to discriminate between themselves and others, they aren't
even capable of it, yet. Slowly they learn--partially through developmental
advances, partly through learning from us--to view everything around them as
"not-them," as not-the-mama or not-the-papa. This is subject-object
thinking, and it is essential to navigating the world.
At the same time, infants have an
openness to new experience, they are like a sponge, soaking it all up, and they
have not learned to distrust yet. And this, obviously, can be a disadvantage in
a dangerous world, children better learn to distrust strangers pretty quick
these days . . .
And that's key: in passages like this,
Jesus isn't advocating that anyone be
little children, that they return to that state completely, but that they have
the qualities of openness to the Divine--and thus to others, within whom the
divine dwells--and a certain inclusiveness, a realization that because of this,
we are indeed all one. An ability to think discriminately, yet realize that
just because we view someone as "not-us" that their opinion, way of
life and et cetera
are not inferior..
Maybe that's what Jesus means when he
tells us to be wise as serpents yet gentle as doves: we're not to abandon our
psychological development, our ability to discriminate, just our propensity to judge. We're not to abandon
our learning, our ability to think rationally and fruitfully, to build great
buildings and fill whole books
with our knowledge, just the notion that that's all there is.
Integrating these childlike qualities
into our daily, human existence is the province of spiritual development, the
fruits of both an active and passive prayer life. As the summer wears on, I
hope to come back to these topics and examine how this can be so. By doing so,
we surely will not lose our reward. Amen.
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