This Week: Proper 26B or All Saints Day
Gospel: Mark 12:28-34 or John 11:32-44
If you’re preparing this week for Proper 26B, then might I suggest beginning with the context—where it is that Jesus is speaking, when, and why?
Jesus is in Jerusalem, it is the last week, in the middle of the confrontation with the Temple leaders and Rome, at the Temple, where he has humiliated the leaders and made fools of them all. Where he has the people’s support and the leaders’ ire and the conspiring to kill him is going on already.
This is when he is asked about the great commandment, when his novel response inspires support from his would-be interrogator. Where Jesus is looking like the sane one and his critics like fascists—afraid of both freedom and class solidarity.
The story itself offers three valuable convictions:
- That love of God is inseparable from love of neighbor.
- That love of self is inseparable from love of God and neighbor.
- That all other laws are fundamentally dependent on this.
Christians are fond of a love command in the abstract, but we do struggle with the idea that the blockhead who acts like a total jerk is supposed to get the same love I try to give God.
And similarly, that either we are to love ourselves as well as we love other people or else we should be as generous to them as we are to ourselves — Gosh, some people (like me) are so selfless, we have to remind ourselves that we are made in the image of God, too. And some people are so into self-care that they need to be reminded that others should have as much from us as we give ourselves. Like, seriously, let people have healthcare and vacations already!
But just as important as this distinction is that Jesus highlights that this isn’t just first commandment, it is central commandment. It is the key we use to observe all the other commands. Does this seem like loving God and neighbor as self? Y/N.
This latter piece is particularly important for rules people or punishment people. The ones who like to fixate on what is supposed to happen and who gets to say. People who like to say that poor people suffer because they don’t try hard enough to get jobs, for example. The idea that this conviction is how they would love God and themselves should inform their economic policy, for example. Would you be willing to say to God, Sorry, no free lunch? Even after hearing about the feeding of the multitudes?
All Saints
In The Episcopal Church, we have the opportunity to transfer All Saints’ Day to Sunday (the only transferrable principal feast), which means we generally do.
The story of the resurrection of Lazarus is covered in Lent 5A (here are resources), so we heard it in full about 18 months ago. So we hear this one more than most.
I find it a wonderful story of confusion, actually. Jesus is trying to show his friends something important, that they are unable to truly see. At least not yet.
I also find the behavior of Mary and Martha so very familiar. It is just the way people in my life have behaved. There is a familiarity to that belief they have, in Jesus trying. As if trying hard is nearly as important as succeeding. That the lack of trying in light of an impossibility shows a callousness.
We’ve seen this in life and in movies frequently. That a person could be guilty of a deeper sin of not trying than of failing to accomplish what they desired. That this is somehow a greater moral failure. That the hero tries the impossible and fails, but we can see how much they loved them in direct proportion to how stupid it is to attempt it. As if we must prove just how much we love a person by scaling Mount Everest with no gear because, well, at least we tried.
The ridiculousness of this is as obvious and inevitable as it is universal. But I suspect that such familiarity with this feeling leaves us unable to see how irrational it really is, and what this preference for absurd demonstrations of love does to our sense of rational behavior.
At the heart of this story is Mary and Martha’s blindness to what Jesus is doing—their inability to see the purpose because of their grief. And this, too, I suspect, is our problem, too. This familiarity with their response, makes it ours, too. The rational part, that Jesus would never get there in time, is not as important as the enormity of their grief.
Yet, he came to do something much greater.
We might, too, connect our confusion in this moment as we read it, dear reader, with how we see our own relationship with ourselves, our loved ones, and our institutions. That our preference is, as Mary and Martha insist, on saving them. We are obsessed with saving lives and structures. This is our most conservative of impulses. To conserve our resources and our planet, too.
But Jesus didn’t come to prevent Lazarus’s death, but to resurrect him from the dead. And this notion, that God is the God, not purely of saving lives, preventing death, conserving institutions, but resurrecting them from the dead and offering new life to the dead…it can be hard to swallow. Even when we know it is true.
The best part of this story really is how easy it is to situate ourselves in the shoes of Mary and Martha. Hopefully, in situating ourselves there, we might be able to appreciate our front-row seat to resurrection and restoration. That this, after all, is the central aspect of our work.
Now we just need to make sense of what that looks like.
Here are some ways I approach this text:
Past Sermons:
For All Saints Day B