Letting Ourselves Be Bound
Ignaz Semmelweiss was an
obstetrician in Vienna in 1800s. Now there were two maternity clinics in Vienna
at that time open to poor women, created to help reduce the rates of infant
mortality and infanticide at the time.
One was staffed by medical students, and the other by midwives in
training. And the clinic staffed by medical students had a mortality rate that
was triple the midwive’s clinic. Semmelweis studied the problem, and found that
the two clinics were nearly identical in skill, technique, and clientele. The only difference he could find was
that the medical students would spend their mornings in class, dissecting
cadavers before going over to perform their shift at the clinic.
This was long
before anyone knew what germs were, but Semmelweis theorized that some
“cadaverous particles” were traveling on the hands of the medical students, and
that was causing the unusually high death rate. He proposed that the
obstetricians wash their hands before going to deliver babies in the maternity
clinic. It worked. The mortality rates dropped by more than 90%. And he was
fired. Yes, fired. You see in spite of his success, nobody wanted to make the
changes that Semmelweis suggested. His theories challenged the way that they
looked at the world, and demanded that they change. They thought his theories
about cadaverous particles were crazy, and they said so.
He was ridiculed. He couldn’t find
a job, so he had to move. It continued to affect his life, and he was
eventually committed to an insane asylum, all for suggesting that doctors ought
to wash their hands after they’ve had them in a dead body. This kind of a thing
is common. Frequently when people come up with an idea that challenges the
status quo, they are branded wingnuts or crazies for their boldness. Relatively
benign change faces a steep uphill battle, but change that challenges the
powers that be rejected even more quickly.
Now if Semmelweis was crazy for
proposing that doctors wash their hands before they deliver babies, what Jesus
is proposing in the book of Mark is out of this world wack-o. It’s tinfoil hat,
convinced that Elvis is living in your guest room, talking to martians in your
head, off the wall bonkers. See, up to this point in his ministry (and in
chapter 3, it’s really just beginning), Jesus has challenged all of the
powerful institutions of authority in first century Palestine. He made a leper
clean with his touch, challenging the monopoly the local priests held on
cleanliness and uncleanliness, for which priests charged fees that weighed
heavily on lepers and other second-class citizens. He ate with taxpayers and
sinners, rejecting the Pharisaic rules of table fellowship that demanded that
only “respectable” people be given access to power and status, and any who were
different should be shunned. He declared to the paralytic, your sins are
forgiven, challenging the scribes who kept records of people’s debts, who
insisted that only through the Temple which they controlled could one find
forgiveness.
Now when word got around that Jesus
was doing these things, rumors began to fly. People began to say that he was
out of his mind, off his rocker, a few crayons short of a box, a few fries
short of a Happy Meal. And who was it who was saying such things? It was those people whose control of
the system he challenged. Scribes were sent up from Jerusalem to fan the
flames, and they went even further than crazy, they said he was the devil. They
declare that he has been casting out demons in the name of Beelzebul, ruler of
demons. The fact that Mark uses Beelzebul in this passage is significant. It
means “Lord of the dwelling,” or “Lord of the house.”
Jesus responds to this accusation
with two parables about houses, challenging once again the world of the elites.
“How can Satan cast out Satan?” Jesus asks. “If a house is divided against
itself, that house will not be able to stand.” Simply put, their accusations don’t make sense. If Jesus
was, in fact, a demon, why would he want to cast out other demons?
But the parable goes deeper than
just a rejection of the scribal arguments. Mark chooses to use the metaphor of
a house for a reason. Throughout Scripture the Temple is referred to as the
house of God. And God’s dwelling place should be where God’s justice, mercy,
and peace reside. And when the people of God allow that justice to be
perverted, allow that mercy to be forsaken, allow that peace to be overturned,
God sent prophets to proclaim his displeasure. The prophet Jeremiah talks about
this, the Lord commands him to stand in the gates of his house and condemn the
people for their oppression of the orphan, the alien, and the widow, “Has this
house,” the Lord says, “which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in
your sight?”
It is these same words Jesus will
say when he also stands at the gates of the Lord’s house, for it was, at that
time, in fact divided against itself. The place where God’s justice was
supposed to reign was a place of power, wealth, and politics, and where wealth
was created and influence peddled among the wealthy and well-connected. The
scribal and priestly authorities who were supposed to provide for the needy,
widows, and orphans were creating new ones by the day. The temple authorities
who were supposed to enforce the Sabbath or Jubilee year that prevented farmers
from being crushed by debt and losing their land was carefully circumvented,
and people in Galilee were being forced to give up the land that their parents
and grandparents had worked and owned, and move to cities to find jobs, or
return to the same place as tenants, and be charged nearly their entire crop
for the privilege.
Jesus
was challenging the laws and interpretations that perverted God’s justice and
mercy, he was rejecting the idea that a few powerful families could set the bar
for righteousness so high that only they could achieve it, and then charge
others for their sinfulness.
We need to be careful here, because
historically, Christians have read these Scriptures and others and proclaimed
that these things are Jewish things. But this reading is dangerous and
scandalous in two ways. The first is that it leads down a dangerous path, for
if we equate modern Judaism with the sinfulness of the wealthy absentee landlord
classes, we declare that Judaism is a faith of legalism and oppression
superceded by the law of grace, and we declare that God has broken God’s
promise to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, and that Jewish people are forsaken and
evil. We have been down that path before, and we know where it leads.
The second way in which seeing this
as a Jewish problem is dangerous is that it lets us off the hook. It lets us
claim that this injustice which Jesus rejected was a Jewish problem, and not
what it really is, a human problem. In our selfishness, in our me-first
approach to life, we seek to create the best world for ourselves, and we fight
to protect our own interests, even when they come at the expense of another. In
our desire for control, we create rules for what it is to be an acceptable
member of our society, and we deny the benefits of society to anyone who does
not fit in. And yet, in our minds we are always the good guys, and we never
consider that it might be us that have divided God’s house against itself. We
never think that we might be the scribes and the Pharisees that Jesus so
decisively rejects.
But
truly we also live in a house which is divided against itself, one in which
God’s justice is rarely found. We proclaim ourselves to be forgiven sinners,
but even in church forgiveness is rarely to be found. Anyone who’s been through
a conflict in a church or been on the wrong side of a grudge knows that our
past sins are never so easily forgotten. We hear reports of abuse at factories
that make our products, yet we only pay lip service to doing something about
the abuses that keep our prices low. Even more injustice, we just pretend not
to see. We are a nation filled with Christians, yet forgiveness is rarely to be
found. We proclaim ourselves recipients of God’s grace, blessed with Christ not
because we deserve it but because God’s love is that powerful, but we deny that
grace to others. Yes, if we say that we are different from the scribes and the
Pharisees we testify against ourselves, for we see the same injustice in our
world, and we do nothing to stop it.
Jesus
told a parable about a man who, having received forgiveness from the king of
ten thousand talents immediately has someone thrown into prison for a debt of
one hundred denarii, and is called again before the king and locked away for
his cruelty. Yet we stand idle as banks who were forgiven debts in the billions
foreclose on people for a few thousand. We proclaim that we are called to share
the love of Christ given to us even though we do not deserve it with everyone
in the world. But we surround ourselves with exclusive institutions, and work
to narrow the paths to success to those who we feel deserve it.
Jesus
concludes our story with another parable, one that makes his intentions clear
as it regards the house of God. “No one can enter a strong man’s house and
plunder his goods without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house
can be plundered.” Jesus intent is nothing short of revolutionary. The house is
divided against itself. It is controlled by “the strong man” the “Lord of the
dwelling” who hoards its goods and controls its wealth. And Jesus intends to
plunder it. By denying the
authority of the Temple to withhold the forgiveness of sins, Jesus binds the
strong men who controlled the population by controlling accounts of their debt,
by eating with tax collectors and sinners, Jesus rejected the strong men who
hoarded their status and influence and extended his peace and fellowship that
all might have hope of success, in cleansing a leper he plundered the priestly
power to control people’s access to God and charge them for it. Jesus sought to bind the strong man, to
shatter the earthly, sinful powers that sought conquest and control, influence
and access.
What
does this mean, for us strong men, who have succeeded in this world, who have
found ourselves with financial security, with power and influence in our
community, with the ability to make our future more just, more merciful, more
grace-filled? What does it mean for us who have hoarded status to ourselves and
our friends, who have withheld healing from those in need, who have denied
fellowship with sinners and social outcasts? I struggle with this every day.
When we are so deeply ensconced in systems that oppress, in dividing the house
against itself, how do we get out?
And
while I don’t think there is an answer, no one-off solution that will bring
justice to an unjust world, salvation to all who need saving grace, hope for
all who despair, I do think that it will begin with those of us strong men
realizing that the house needs to be plundered, that the bounty and blessings
of God must be shared, and letting ourselves be bound.
Letting
ourselves be bound by a desire to be the body of Christ in the world, bound as
faithful ministers of God’s grace to extend healing hands, listening ears, and
helpful hearts to those in need. Letting ourselves be bound by those blessed
ties which bind our hearts in Christian love. Letting ourselves be bound by our
conviction that God’s grace comes not only to those who are righteous and good,
but to those who are flawed, broken, and sinful.
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