Participation Not Substitution

Posted on October 18, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

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Participation Not Substitution

Herb Montgomery, October 18, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark:

Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”

“What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.

They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”

“You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?”

“We can,” they answered.

Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.”

When the ten heard about this, they became indignant with James and John. Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” (Mark 10:35-45)

In our reading this week, we are again encountering themes that repeat multiple times in the gospels of Mark.

James’ and John’s request to sit at Jesus’ right and left hand echoes the scene in Mark 9 where the disciples were competing to be the greatest. (I wrote at length on this when we covered Mark 9; see Servants of the Most Vulnerable).

Jesus’ response promoting servanthood is also the same here as in Mark 9. When this rhetoric is directed at those seeking power and privilege over others, it can be a corrective. Those who were seeking status above others should instead have aspired to serve them. Yet, this passage has historically been directed not at those seeking privilege over others but at those seeking equity and equality with others. Christians have used servanthood to inspire some to passively accept a lower status think their social, political, or economic place held some quality of greater holiness. This passage was also used to defend the institution of slavery.

This passage can be used for life-giving purposes, but it has also been used in death-dealing ways. It is critical that we learn to rightly discern the difference and intentionally understand and apply this passage. Ask who is the target audience of a given interpretation. Is this passage being shared with servants to keep them in their servitude, or is it used to challenge the ambition of those who are seeking to be served?

What I find fascinating about Jesus’ responses in Mark 9 and 10 is that Mark references objects that Christianity has typically viewed through the lens of substitution and atonement, but frames them in terms of participation.

Whether we are discussing a cross (Mark 9) or a cup and a baptism (Mark 10), these did not represent things Jesus was doing instead of us or even in our place on our behalf. These were activities Jesus was inviting his disciples to join him in and to participate in themselves. In Mark, Jesus isn’t doing things for his disciples. He is calling his disciples to do them, too.

Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan remind us that, “For Mark, it is about participation with Jesus and not substitution by Jesus. Mark has those followers recognize enough of that challenge that they change the subject and avoid the issue every time” (Marcus J. Borg, John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem, Kindle location 1582).

But we must be careful here as well, lest we promote the destructive myth of redemptive suffering. Whether we participate in a cross, a cup, or the fiery baptism spoken of in these passage, we must remember that the way of Jesus is not a death cult. It is about our refusal to let go of life, not our embrace of death. As Delores Williams rightly reminds us, Christians who are suffering under oppression “cannot forget the cross, but neither can they glorify it. To do so is to glorify suffering and to render…exploitation sacred. To do so is to glorify the sin of defilement” (Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God Talk, p.132).

A cross is not intrinsic to following Jesus. When we follow Jesus, we are choosing to stand up to injustice and call for a world shaped in justice and love. A cross only enters this scenario if those who benefit form an unjust system become threatened by our calls for change and threaten us with a cross if we don’t become silent. If they don’t choose to impose a cross as a threat, then there would not be one. This is a subtle but important element in our reading this week. Jesus didn’t choose to die. He refused to let go of life even with threatened to do so: “Jesus chose to live a life in opposition to unjust, oppressive cultures. Jesus did not choose the cross but chose integrity and faithfulness, refusing to change course because of threat” (Brown and Parker, For God So Loved the World? Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse, p. 27).

Jesus didn’t choose to suffer. He choose to stay committed to life and those things that are life-giving. We must remember: “It is not the acceptance of suffering that gives life; it is commitment to life that gives life. The question, moreover, is not am I willing to suffer? but do I desire fully to live? This distinction is subtle and, to some, specious, but in the end it makes a great difference in how people interpret and respond to suffering” (Christianity, Patriarchy and Abuse, p. 18).

When Jesus invites us to follow him, he invites us to take hold of life in opposition to the death-dealing forces in our world. He calls us to participate with him in shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone. And if those who have privilege and power fear losing those things through our society becoming more just, if they threaten us if we don’t sit down and be silent, then Jesus calls us to not let go of life and to keep calling for change even in the face of threats. This is one of the most compelling elements of the Jesus story for me personally. Jesus was leading a Jewish renewal movement in opposition to the elite class who were complicit with the Romans’ oppression of his people. The Jesus story is a story of a Jesus who stood up to those in power for what was right. He stood in his own Hebrew prophetic justice tradition of speaking truth to power. He called out the injustices of his day in the very heart of the temple state, and was crucified as a result. But the story doesn’t end there. This story isn’t about death or dying. In this story, God doesn’t triumph over death by more death, even one more death, even if it’s Jesus’ death. Death is reversed, overturned, and undone by life, resurrection life.

“The resurrection is God’s definitive victory over crucifying powers of evil . . . The impressive factor is how it [the cross] is defeated. It is defeated by a life-giving rather than a life-negating force. God’s power, unlike human power, is not a ‘master race’ kind of power. That is, it is not a power that diminishes the life of another so that others might live. God’s power respects the integrity of all human bodies and the sanctity of all life. This is a resurrecting power. Therefore, God’s power never expresses itself through the humiliation or denigration of another. It does not triumph over life. It conquers death by resurrecting life. The force of God is a death-negating, life-affirming force.” (Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, pp. 182-183).

I too know something of what it means to stand up for justice and love. I know something of pushback from those who are benefitting from an unjust system, pushback that threatens your own livelihood and ministry. These days, I’m thankful for resurrecting life. My life looks nothing today like I thought it would twenty years ago. But that’s okay. I wouldn’t change the stances I’ve taken or the people being harmed that I’ve stood in solidarity with. I know it’s the same for many of you too.

Standing up for love and justice sometimes involves drinking the same cup Jesus drank and being baptized with the same baptism he was baptized with. In those moments we are participating with Jesus in standing up rather than choosing to be silent. We are in the right story. We must remember, this story doesn’t end in death, dying, or a cross. This story, and our story, ends in resurrection. Love wins.

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. Is participation more life giving for you than substitution? In what ways? Discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate.

My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.

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You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking. If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it. You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 32: Mark 10.35-45. Lectionary B, Proper 24

Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to do more than just talking.

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.

This week:

Season 1 Episode 27: Participation Not Substitution

Mark 10:35-45

“I too know something of what it means to stand up for justice and love. I know something of pushback from those who are benefitting from an unjust system, pushback that threatens your own livelihood and ministry. These days, I’m thankful for resurrecting life. My life looks nothing today like I thought it would twenty years ago. But that’s okay. I wouldn’t change the stances I’ve taken or the people being harmed that I’ve stood in solidarity with. I know it’s the same for many of you too. Standing up for love and justice sometimes involves drinking the same cup Jesus drank and being baptized with the same baptism he was baptized with. In those moments we are participating with Jesus in standing up rather than choosing to be silent. We are in the right story. We must remember, this story doesn’t end in death, dying, or a cross. This story, and our story, ends in resurrection. Love wins.”

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/participation-not-substitution

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

Available now on Audible!

After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.

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Divorce Just Ain’t What It Used To Be

Posted on October 4, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”

Herb Montgomery, October 4, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark:

Some Pharisees came and tested him by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?”

“What did Moses command you?” he replied.

They said, “Moses permitted a man to write a certificate of divorce and send her away.”

“It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

When they were in the house again, the disciples asked Jesus about this. He answered, “Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”

People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them. (Mark 10:2-16)

So many of us read this week’s passage with cultural presuppositions that we don’t even realize we have. Let’s unpack them.

The Jewish law being debated in our reading this week comes from Deuteronomy 24:1-4:

“If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, and if after she leaves his house she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, then her first husband, who divorced her, is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled.”

The first thing that jumps out at me is the word “indecent.” Indecency has always been a charge used against women throughout history and rarely leveled against men. But this law was not written with the same cultural assumptions about marriage that we practice today. Abraham, Israel, Judah, David, Solomon, and others had multiple wives. Polygamy was perfectly acceptable in their culture. Read Deuteronomy 24 again in the context of polygamy rather than monogamy and see if you don’t begin to see how problematic the passage is. “Displeases?” What does that mean?

The culture when this law was written was predominantly heterosexist and deeply patriarchal. Only men could have multiple wives; there was no egalitarian practice here. And only men could divorce their wives. Under this law, a woman could be divorced by her husband for any reason. Women under this law were vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, and they had precious little recourse.

So deeply ingrained was this patriarchal way of practicing divorce that even the otherwise economic justice minded prophet Jeremiah describes Israel’s God as also participating a patriarchal form of divorce (see Jeremiah 3:8).

After the Jewish people began returning from Babylonian exile, monogamy began gaining prominence over polygamy in Jewish society (see Monogamy, Jewish Encyclopedia).

Monogamy later became further reinforced within Jewish culture through both Greek and Roman occupation. Both cultures socially enforced martial monogamy. The Romans defined marital monogamy as policy (sexual monogamy was a separate, personal matter).

While divorce was only permitted for husbands in Jewish society, in Roman law, divorce was more egalitarian. That is, a woman could divorce her husband just as readily as a man could divorce his wife. In telling Salome’s story, Josephus contrasts the Roman and the Jewish practices of divorce:

“But some time afterward, when Salome happened to quarrel with Costobarus, she sent him a bill of divorce and dissolved her marriage with him, though this was not according to the Jewish laws; for with us it is lawful for a husband to do so; but a wife; if she departs from her husband, cannot of herself be married to another, unless her former husband put her away. However, Salome chose to follow not the law of her country, but the law of her authority [Roman], and so renounced her wedlock;” (Josephus, Flavius. The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged, Delmarva Publications, Kindle Edition, Location 18908)

Josephus also gives us some insight into how a man divorced his wife in his own society and the time in which our reading this week is set:

“He that desires to be divorced from his wife for any cause whatsoever, (and many such causes happen among men,) let him in writing give assurance that he will never use her as his wife any more; for by this means she may be at liberty to marry another husband, although before this bill of divorce be given, she is not to be permitted so to do: but if she be misused by him also, or if, when he is dead, her first husband would marry her again, it shall not be lawful for her to return to him.” (Josephus, Flavius. The Works of Josephus: Complete and Unabridged, Delmarva Publications, Kindle Edition. Location 5363)

Within Jesus’ society, the Pharisees hotly debated the subject of divorce. Pharisees of the School of Hillel believed that a man could divorce his wife for any reason whatsoever. Within in that patriarchal culture, the economic results of a woman being divorced could be devastating. A woman who could be divorced for any reason would be in a very fragile position socially, politically, and economically. The Pharisees of the School of Shammai strongly opposed the School of Hillel’s view of divorce, however, and stated that a husband could only divorce his wife if there had been infidelity.

Within the context of this debate among the Pharisees, we read our passage this week. Mark’s Jesus takes a hard stance against divorce as practiced in his society. I believe that Mark’s Jesus demonstrates a profound-for-his-time concern with the well-being of women, their survival, and their welfare. Jesus opposes divorce as practiced at that time with his people’s own origin stories (Genesis 1 and 2). And that was the only form of divorce that existed in Jewish society then. The form of divorce we practice today was night-and-day different from the form practiced in Jesus’ time.

We should also note that Mark was written for a more cosmopolitan Jesus-following community made up of both Jews and Gentiles thanks to the evangelistic efforts of Paul and others like him. So although Jesus takes a strong stance against divorce for the protection of women, Mark’s Jesus also applies the same prohibitions to women and men, since in the larger Roman society women could divorce just as men could. Compare this to Matthew’s Jesus on the subject of divorce. Matthew was written primarily for a Jewish Jesus-following community, and it does not account for women divorcing men because wives did not divorce men in that community. Also, in Matthew, Jesus sides with the Shammai Pharisees by stating divorce should not be practiced but was permitted if the woman had been unfaithful:

“It has been said, ‘Anyone who divorces his wife must give her a certificate of divorce.’ But I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery, and anyone who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.” (Matthew 5:31)

So what are we to make of all of this today?

It is foolish at best and dangerous at worst to build a modern practice of marriage and divorce on any of this. We can use it to inform our decisions, but we can’t use it as the basis for our decisions. Our context is different today. Let me explain.

In our time, not all divorce looks like the kind of divorce being practiced in Jesus’ day and to which the Jesus of Mark’s gospel was so opposed. Divorce that is only concerned with the well being of men in a patriarchal culture should be opposed. But what do we now do in matters of abuse where there has been no sexual infidelity? Or with marriages where both partners come to a mutual, consent that a mistake has been made and they they are better as friends than as marriage partners?

I was raised by a single mother who was married multiple times, sometimes to abusive, narcissistic men. Should my mother have waited for her husband to have a sexual encounter outside of their marriage before she divorced him? In one situation, waiting might have gotten her killed. I take the principle of Jesus’ concern for the wellbeing of women in Mark’s gospel and concern for my mother’s well being as encouraging women in her position to leave rather than suffer violence. This is what I mean by allowing the story to inform us in our practice of marriage and divorce.

Our practice of marriage and divorce in our culture today should be based on the ethics and values of the golden rule, the well being of all parties involved, whether abuse is taking place, and an egalitarian concern for justice for everyone. This is the spirit of the gospels’ teachings. People matter above institutions. Institutions were made for people not people for institutions. Even the institution of marriage.

Justice and that which was life-giving were Jesus’ concerns in Mark. And that which is just and life-giving should be our concern today, too. Marriage and divorce are two sides of the same coin. We are not infallible. And when marriage becomes death-dealing, divorce as a life-giving option should be among the choices available to those seeking to turn things around. Whether people believe that they can work on and change their marriage or that their marriage should be undone, that is strictly up to them. It is not our place to shame or look down on them. It’s our job to life-givingly support them during such difficult choices. People who have been divorced or are going through divorce don’t need our judgement. They need our encouragement and our care.

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. How does the cultural context help you understand the gospels’ teachings on divorce more appropriately for our context today? Discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 30: Mark 10.2-16. Lectionary B, Proper 22

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

This week:

Season 1 Episode 25: Divorce Just Ain’t What It Used To Be

Mark 10:2-16

“Our practice of marriage and divorce in our culture today should be based on the ethics and values of the golden rule, the well being of all parties involved, whether abuse is taking place, and an egalitarian concern for justice for everyone. This is the spirit of the gospels’ teachings. People matter above institutions. Institutions were made for people not people for institutions. Even the institution of marriage.

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/divorce-just-aint-what-it-used-to-be

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

Available now on Audible!

Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?

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Inclusivity and Taking Care of the Vulnerable

Posted on September 28, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”

Herb Montgomery, September 28, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our subject this week is inclusivity and taking care of the vulnerable. Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark,

“Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”

“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward.

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into Gehenna, where

“‘the worms that eat them do not die,

and the fire is not quenched.’

Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt among yourselves, and be at peace with each other.” (Mark 9:38-50)

There are quite a few things to consider in this week’s lectionary reading from the gospels. The first exchange we encounter is the dialogue between Jesus and his disciples over a person doing something in Jesus’ name but not as part of the disciples’ group. Jesus’ response is a generous, inclusive “big tent.”. It’s not limited, restrictive, or exclusive. It doesn’t say only certain ones are part of Jesus’ movement. Jesus does not view this person as a rival in competition with his immediate circle of disciples. He is not threatened by their actions, but rather is encouraged by it. He tells his disciples, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”

The spirit of Jesus’ work is love, inclusivity, justice and liberation. He doesn’t add additional criteria. He doesn’t need everyone to be the same in every detail. He exhibits a comfort with diversity as long as it aligns with the core values of a safe, compassionate, just world for everyone. Notice that his example is as simple as offering a cup of water to the thirsty: it’s about compassion and taking responsibility for others having what they need to thrive. We don’t need to overcomplicate this. Today, there are many people who, due to their negative experiences with Christianity, are uncomfortable with any association with “Jesus” yet are deeply involved in working toward justice. We can come alongside them and aid their work because, though we may be different in some particulars, in the end we are all working for the same kind of world: a world for all of us.

The next thing in our reading is Jesus’ words about how we treat “these little ones.” A central theme of Jesus’ synoptic teachings and the tradition of the Hebrew prophets is what Liberation Theologians call a preferential option for the most vulnerable. The “little ones” in Jesus’ community were the most vulnerable among them. Just as simple as making sure those who are thirsty have water, this principle is about how we relate to those most vulnerable to injustice, oppression, and abuse in our communities. Are we creating a society that safeguards the most vulnerable?

This dialogue about the little ones includes a reference to Gehenna. Some translations use the word “hell.” This is a signifiant issue for me. Some Christians have taken these statements and created a post mortem realm of eternally burning torment and torture with no foundation in the teachings of the Jewish Jesus. In the final section of my book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels, I share how “Gehenna” evolved in the Hebrew scriptures.

In the Hebrew prophetic justice tradition, Gehenna became a reference to destruction and subjugation by Gentile empires in this life, not life after death. And this destruction came because they failed to take care of the vulnerable in their communities and they violated and exploited them.

Here are just a few examples from the Hebrew prophets, warnings not of post mortem events, but of events that would transpire for the nation in this life if they did not correct their course:

“Edom’s streams will be turned into pitch,

her dust into burning sulfur;

her land will become blazing pitch!

It will not be quenched night or day;

its smoke will rise forever.

From generation to generation it will lie desolate;

no one will ever pass through it again.“ (Isaiah 34:9-10)

“But if you do not obey me to keep the Sabbath day holy by not carrying any load as you come through the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then I will kindle an unquenchable fire in the gates of Jerusalem that will consume her fortresses.” (Jeremiah 17:27)

“The voice of the LORD will shatter Assyria;

with his rod he will strike them down.

Every stroke the LORD lays on them

with his punishing club

will be to the music of timbrels and harps,

as he fights them in battle with the blows of his arm.

His Topheth [the Valley of Hinnom or Gehenna] has long been prepared;

it has been made ready for the king.

Its fire pit has been made deep and wide,

with an abundance of fire and wood;

the breath of the LORD,

like a stream of burning sulfur,

sets it ablaze.“ (Isaiah 30:31-33)

‘And they will go out and look on the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; the worms that eat them will not die, the fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.’” (Isaiah 66:22-24)

Both the “unquenchable fire” and the “worm that doesn’t die” symbolized destruction one would not be able to stop. Neither Isaiah nor the gospels use this language to describe something taking place after death. Jesus, standing in the lineage of the prophets defending the poor and like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and others before him, was calling for justice. Jesus used Jewish language and metaphors to warn of impending doom. Each of these prophets denounced, implicated, and indicted a system that benefited the powerful while exploiting the vulnerable.

We must also be honest about the ableist language in this text. There is a spectrum with being whole on one end and Gehenna on the other, somewhere along the spectrum is missing limbs, being “crippled,” and missing an eye. The language paints these conditions as being less than being whole, yet not as bad as Gehenna. I reject this use of disability. As Jesus followers today, we can tell the Jesus story in better ways.

Lastly, Jesus teaches about salt losing its saltiness. In that region, salt was harvested by collecting all the white rocks and placing them in a salt bag. This bag was used to stir food being prepared. The salt would dissolve through the cloth but any white rocks inadvertently included in the bag that were not salt would remain. Eventually the bag would lose its ability to season food because all the salt was gone: the salt would lose its saltiness.

Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk writes,

“Much of what passes for the propagation of the gospel actually equates to acts of oppression. When the saving of souls is of ultimate value, it can become easy for other values to be pushed aside. This evangelistic impulse turns every mystical experience into an altar call and every person into a soul to be saved. And historically Christians have shown an ability to care for people’s souls while dismissing their bodies, their land or their dignity.” (Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk, The UnKingdom of God.)

In this passage, Jesus has been speaking about how we relate to the most vulnerable among us. Are we taking care of them? When we must be intentional about our refusal to become so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good. We must care about saving bodies and our material world around us an not exclusively be about saving souls. We must be concerned with the injustices and suffering of the here and now rather than solely focused on a post mortem future. Otherwise, we have lost our salt. We are called to follow Jesus’ example in Mark’s gospel, to affect and transform our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone, especially our most vulnerable.

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. How do you see our passage about taking care of the most vulnerable in our communities applying to recent events in Springfield, Ohio? Discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 29: Mark 9.38-50. Lectionary B, Proper 21

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

This week:

Season 1 Episode 24: Inclusivity and Taking Care of the Vulnerable

Mark 9:38-50

“Love, inclusivity, justice, and liberation don’t impose extra conditions, nor do they require everyone to be alike in every detail. Jesus embodies an openness to diversity. In this passage, He speaks about our responsibility toward the most vulnerable among us—are we truly caring for them? We must be intentional in our rejection of being so ‘heavenly minded’ that we are indifferent to the needs of our world. Our mission is not just to save souls but to care for bodies and our material world. We must address the injustices and suffering of the present, rather than focusing solely on the afterlife. Otherwise, we lose our essence, our ‘salt.’ In Mark’s gospel, Jesus calls us to transform the world into a safe, compassionate, and just home for everyone, especially the most vulnerable.”

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/inclusivity-and-taking-care-of-the-vulnerable

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

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Servants of the Most Vulnerable

Posted on September 23, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”

Herb Montgomery, September 23, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark:

They left that place and passed through Galilee. Jesus did not want anyone to know where they were, because he was teaching his disciples. He said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.” But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it.

They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.

Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.” He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.(Mark 9:30-37)

There’s quite a bit for us to unpack this week.

First, our reading affirms the resurrection in a way that the Markan community for whom this version of the Jesus story was written would have expected. In this narrative, Jesus knew he was going to be resurrected all along. It was only the disciples that didn’t understand what was going to happen.

But what grabs my attention most in our reading this week is the argument by the disciples over who was the greatest disciple of Jesus’ and how Jesus responded.

Jesus turns our hierarchical ways of structuring our communities upside down. He is a genuine anarchist in the truest definition of the term: one opposed to hierarchal ways of structuring society. What our passage also reveals is that the Markan community must have needed to address this issue. I can easily imagine debates in the early Jesus movement after Jesus’ death over who was the greatest of his disciples, especially as some of them competed for positions of power and influence.

Mark’s gospel doesn’t completely eliminate hierarchical structure here, but instead defines leadership in the community as about serving community needs, not simply holding a position of power over others. We find this echoed in other parts of the Christian scriptures:

“To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ’s sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed: Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.” (1 Peter 5:1-3, emphasis added.)

I do want to offer a word of caution here. We must hold serving others in tension with other values. Without that balance, it can be death dealing. It can lead those being subjugated and/or exploited to passively accept their exploitation rather than correcting their exploiters.

Consider how women have been subjugated by patriarchal Christianity . Rather than addressing patriarchy and moving toward a more egalitarian community, the “greatest is a servant and the first shall be last” rhetoric has often been misused. Rather than correcting those seeking positions of status over others (like the disciples in the original story), it has been used to encourage women to accept their subjugation to and exploitation by men in the church as “Christlike.” Mary Daly writes:

“The qualities that Christianity idealizes, especially for women, are also those of a victim: sacrificial love, passive acceptance of suffering, humility, meekness, etc. Since these are the qualities idealized in Jesus “who died for our sins,” his functioning as a model reinforces the scapegoat syndrome for women.” (Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 77)

This has not only been historically true for women but Christian slave masters also used this rhetoric against their slaves. We have examples of this even in the Christian scriptures themselves. It didn’t take long before Jesus’ words intended to address and correct those seeking status over others were twisted and used against those being suppressed. One example can be found in the epistle to the Ephesians:

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.” (Ephesians 6:5)

There are other examples in the letter to the Ephesians too: not only slaves being taught to accept their subjugation and exploitation, but also women and children.

“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands.” (Ephesians 5:22)

“Children, obey your parents.” (Ephesians 6:1)

When we compare these passages to our reading this week, I find a stark contrast. Rather than telling children to be obedient to the adults in their lives, Jesus uses his lesson on service to teach adults about how they should treat children, the most vulnerable among us. Rather than calling for slaves to obey or women to submit, Jesus is instead calling anyone who wants to serve the Jesus community to intentionally practice a preferential option for the most vulnerable among the community. In that society (and most societies) that group is children.

This makes me ask the question: are we misusing the teachings of Jesus today to further deepen others’ subjugation? Or are we practicing a preferential option for the most vulnerable in our communities, seeking to serve rather than possessing status, and calling for and working toward changes that eliminate subjugation altogether?

It makes a big difference whether Jesus’ words in our reading this week are used as a corrective for those seeking standing and status, and whether we define leadership in the Jesus community as about serving the needs of the community especially those most vulnerable to injustice. Are we taking Jesus’ words about service and encouraging those who are vulnerable to passively accept subjugation in our culture? Are we using Jesus’ teachings to ensure that leadership is life-giving, or are we flipping Jesus’ script and using his teachings in ways that dehumanize and devalue some people’s intrinsic worth.

Some may consider this to be a subtle difference, but it makes a huge difference. One way to tell the difference is to ask yourself who is being addressed: those in power and being corrected for how they lord their authority over others, or those being lorded over and encouraged to passively accept their experience?

In the very next chapter of Mark, Jesus addresses this issue again when he says:

“You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.”(Mark 10:42-44, emphasis added.)

How we shape our faith communities matters. And these words offer wisdom in our justice work in our faith communities and in the wider society. When we vote for leaders, are we voting for leaders who have at heart the well being of even the most vulnerable among us? Do they care about the actual needs of the community they are seeking to serve or are they primarily concerned about themselves and what they want from whatever leadership role or office they are seeking?

As I consider the political season we are presently in here in the Unites States, I hear wisdom calling to each of us from these words in Mark’s gospel. Consider the record of those seeking office from our local communities all the way to the Office of the President. Do they really care about others or do they only want your vote? Ask yourself, how do those asking for your support treat those who most vulnerable to injustice, subjugation, and exploitation in our society? Character matters! Is their character such that seeks to serve themself or to genuinely serve the people? “Anyone who wants to be first, must be servant of all.”

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. How have you witnessed the servant model used in both healthy and unhealthy ways in your own experience? Discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 28: Mark 9.30-37. Lectionary B, Proper 20

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

This week:

Season 1 Episode 23:Servants of the Most Vulnerable

Mark 9:30-37

“Some may consider this to be a subtle difference, but it makes a huge difference. One way to tell the difference is to ask yourself who is being addressed: those in power and being corrected for how they lord their authority over others, or those being lorded over and encouraged to passively accept their experience? How we shape our faith communities matters. And these words offer wisdom in our justice work in our faith communities and in the wider society. When we vote for leaders, are we voting for leaders who have at heart the well being of even the most vulnerable among us? Do they care about the actual needs of the community they are seeking to serve or are they primarily concerned about themselves and what they want from whatever leadership role or office they are seeking? As I consider the political season we are presently in here in the Unites States, I hear wisdom calling to each of us from these words in Mark’s gospel. Consider the record of those seeking office from our local communities all the way to the Office of the President. Do they really care about others or do they only want your vote? Ask yourself, how do those asking for your support treat those who most vulnerable to injustice, subjugation, and exploitation in our society? Character matters! Is their character such that seeks to serve themself or to genuinely serve the people? “Anyone who wants to be first, must be servant of all.”

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/servants-of-the-most-vulnerable

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

Available now on Audible!

Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?

Free Sign Up Here

Refusing to Passively Endure Injustice

Posted on September 13, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

Thank You!

If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”

Herb Montgomery, September 13, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark:

Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”

Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.

He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:27-38)

I love it when the gospel lectionary readings are from one of the synoptic gospels. This passage in Mark gives us a lot to consider because this passage has been used for harm. As Jesus followers today, we can choose to let go of harmful interpretations to make room for more life-giving ones.

First, the claim that Jesus was the Messiah has long been used to harm our Jewish friends, family and neighbors. Before Christians used the title of Messiah against the Jewish community, who the Messiah was was an intra-tradition argument. What I mean is that Jewish voices within the Jewish community initially made the claim of Messiahship was in dialogue and sometimes debate with other Jewish voices. The earliest Jewish Jesus followers, even before the narrative events of his death and resurrection, had recognized something in Jesus’ teachings that gave them hope in Jewish renewal and restoration. That hope was originally a liberation hope within a larger oppressed community that was anything but monolithic. For them, Jesus’ teachings pointed to the same liberation they hoped for.

The community for whom the gospel of Mark was written recognized Jesus as Messiah and our reading this week was intended to affirm this recognition. There is something political for the early church deeper in this reading too. Naming Peter as the one who declares Jesus’ messiahship in this gospel narrative also affirms the community’s recognition of Peter’s authority among the other apostles in the early Jesus movement. Jesus as Messiah was not just an question for the Markan community. All of the communities after Jesus hotly debated which voices were to be recognized as authoritative. So this week’s passage is actually much more about Peter than it is about Jesus: it is only secondarily about Jesus’ messiahship, a tenet that this community already accepted. We should read this passage primarily as establishing Peter’s authority as one who recognized and affirmed the community’s belief in Jesus’ messiahship.

Whatever we make of the claim of Jesus’ messiahship today, we must be intentional about holding our interpretation in a life-giving way for all. Messiahship originally meant liberation and restoration. Today we must similarly hold our interpretation in a way that does no harm. Within Christianity today, we must be especially careful in regard to the history of harm we are responsible for by the careless ways we have used the term “Messiah” when we speak of Jesus.

Let’s now talk about Jesus’ call to take up the cross. Many Christians have held the cross in a way that promotes the myth of redemptive suffering. Too often, bearing one’s cross refers to the kind of suffering that every person suffers whether they are standing up for justice or not. Let’s be honest: life includes a lot of suffering. It’s how we interpret and respond to that suffering that matters. But the cross was only about a specific kind of suffering, not all suffering in general. The cross was a political consequence and had a political context. The cross was suffering perpetrated by those in positions of power and privilege on people who were calling for change within an unjust system. Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino warns us of romanticizing the cross and removing it from its original political context, and thus romanticizing suffering that has nothing to do with working for justice.

“There has been. a tendency to isolate the cross from the historical course that led Jesus to it by virtue of his conflicts with those who held political religious power. In this way the cross has been turned into nothing more than a paradigm of the suffering to which all human beings are subject insofar as they are limited beings. This has given rise to a mystique of suffering rather than to a mystique of following Jesus, whose historical career led to the historical cross.” (Jon Sobrino, quoted in Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker’s For God So Loved the World?, p. 16)

Suffering doesn’t give life. Mujerista theologians (Hispanic woman’s liberation theologians) remind us that life is found in our struggle against suffering (see Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century, p. 21).

Jesus didn’t choose to suffer. He chose to live a life in opposition to injustice and oppression. Jesus didn’t choose to die. He chose to refuse to let go of his hold on the fight for justice when threatened with a Roman cross if he continued. For Jesus, the cross was a Roman-imposed response to Jesus’ refusal to change his course. The cross today is not suffering in general but the threat by those who benefit from an unjust status quo that we will suffer if we speak out. I don’t interpret Jesus in this week’s reading as promoting suffering. Rather he is calling for those being threatened for speaking out against injustice to keep speaking out, to not be silent, to keep up the fight and join him in the fight even in the face of real threats.

Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, feminist theologians, rightly interpret the cross when they write:

“To be a Christian means keeping faith with those who have heard and lived God’s call for justice, radical love, and liberation; who have challenged unjust systems both political and ecclesiastical; and who in that struggle have refused to be victims and have refused to cower under the threat of violence, suffering, and death. Fullness of life is attained in moments of decision for such faithfulness and integrity. When the threat of death is refused and the choice is made for justice, radical love, and liberation, the power of death is overthrown. Resurrection is radical courage. Resurrection means that death is overcome in those precise instances when human beings choose life, refusing the threat of death. Jesus climbed out of the grave in the Garden of Gethsemane when he refused to abandon his commitment to the truth even though his enemies threatened him with death. On Good Friday, the Resurrected One was Crucified.” (God So Loved the World?, Brown and Parker, p. 22)

Too often Christians in power have used “bearing one’s cross” to teach that to follow Jesus means to passively and patiently endure whatever abuse, injustice, or oppression one is experiencing with the hope that in the afterlife your suffering will be rewarded. Nothing could be further from the way Jesus describes taking up one’s cross in our reading this week. The cross is not passively enduring injustice. The cross is the threat abusers and oppressors make against us for our refusal to passively endure injustice. The cross is the threat intended to make us passive.

When Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross, he’s telling them to keep refusing to be passive, even if you’re threatened with a cross for doing so. And even in doing so, we must remember that the cross is not intrinsic to standing up for what is right. A cross only enters our story if our abuser or oppressor chooses to respond to our calls for change with threats rather than change. Jesus’ call is a call to courageously refuse to let go of your hope for justice, for change, for liberation, and freedom to thrive. Don’t passively endure suffering. Don’t give in when those who have privileges to lose seek to persuade us to patiently “endure pain, humiliation, and violation of our sacred rights to self-determination, wholeness, and freedom” rather than speaking out (God So Loved the World?, Brown and Parker, p. 2)

How are you speaking out for change right now? How are you working for a brighter today and tomorrow? In whatever ways we are working for justice, even if those benefitting from injustice threaten us, the Jesus of our passage this week calls us to keep at it.

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. Share an experience of where you refused to be silent about injustice? Discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 19: Mark 8.27-38. Lectionary B, Proper 19

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

This week:

Season 1 Episode 22: Refusing to Passively Endure Injustice

Mark 8:27-38

“Too often Christians in power have used “bearing one’s cross” to teach that to follow Jesus means to passively and patiently endure whatever abuse, injustice, or oppression one is experiencing with the hope that in the afterlife your suffering will be rewarded. Nothing could be further from the way Jesus describes taking up one’s cross in our reading this week. The cross is not passively enduring injustice. The cross is the threat abusers and oppressors make against us for our refusal to passively endure injustice. The cross is the threat intended to make us passive. When Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross, he’s telling them to keep refusing to be passive, even if you’re threatened with a cross for doing so. Jesus’ call is a call to courageously refuse to let go of your hope for justice, for change, for liberation, and freedom to thrive. Don’t passively endure suffering. Don’t give in when those who have privileges to lose seek to persuade us to patiently ‘endure pain, humiliation, and violation of our sacred rights to self-determination, wholeness, and freedom’ rather than speaking out”

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/refusing-to-passively-endure-injustice

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

Available now on Audible!

Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?

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Jesus, a Greek Woman and a Magical Cure

Posted on September 7, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

Thank You!

If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”

Herb Montgomery, September 7, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark:

Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.

“First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

“Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”

Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.”

She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.

Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis. There some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged Jesus to place his hand on him.

After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spit and touched the man’s tongue. He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means “Be opened!”). At this, the man’s ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.

Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone. But the more he did so, the more they kept talking about it. People were overwhelmed with amazement. “He has done everything well,” they said. “He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” (Mark 7:24-36)

Our reading this week contains two stories that inspire a conversation about what it means to make our world a safer, more compassionate, and just home for everyone.

The first story is of a Greek woman who approaches Jesus on behalf of her daughter who is possessed. There’s a lot to unpack in this story.

First, possession in the gospel of Mark is a consistent metaphor for the very real, concrete possession the people of this region experienced from the Roman Empire. In Mark 6, the demon is named “Legion.” This was what the largest unit of the Roman Empire was called. A Legion was often placed in an indigenous people’s territory to keep them from revolting. The Jewish people were not the only ones subjugated by the Roman Empire and their territory taken as Roman possession. The Greeks were subjugated by the Romans, too.

The second thing to notice is the intersection of two different social locations Jesus is standing in simultaneously. As a Jew, Jesus belongs to a people once subjugated and oppressed by the Greeks during the Maccabean era, when the Jewish people were violently oppressed by the Greek emperor Antiochus Epiphanies. This gives us context for why a subjugated, indigenous people (the Jews in this case) would consider their oppressors and subjugators (in this case the Greeks) to be dogs. Many Jewish people also at this time referred to Romans as dogs. Social location here matters and helps us understand context.

The other social location Jesus is standing in is being a man in a patriarchal world that subjugated and oppressed women. Jesus is oppressed and empowered simultaneously. You would be standing on two different streets simultaneously if you stood where those two streets intersected. This is called intersectionality: Jesus is standing in two intersecting social locations in his exchange with this woman. As a Jew, he is in the social location of those who were once oppressed by those he is interacting with. As a man he is in the social location of patriarchal privilege and power in relation to the woman he is interacting with He is simultaneously standing in the privilege of oppressor (as a man) and disadvantage (as a Jew).

Intersectionality is such a rich lens through which to relate to our world as we work for justice. Jesus being Jewish helps us understand why he would call a Greek a dog, while his being a male calling a woman a dog is unacceptable and derogatory. When this woman calls Jesus on it, she ultimately enlarges and expands his experience and understanding. We never see Jesus relating like this to Jewish women. In fact, in a patriarchal culture, Jesus’ relation to Jewish women is remarkably egalitarian. In this story, Jesus learns that Greek woman live in intersecting social locations too. He comes to see that this person before him is more than just a Greek person whose people once persecuted his people. He sees her as a human being, a parent who simply wants something better for her child than Roman oppression. Everyone who is a parent can identify with wanting something better than you’ve experienced for your children.

We all live in intersecting social locations within our own system too. We are all oppressor and oppressed simultaneously depending on which aspect of our identities is privileged or disadvantaged in our society. What this story models is how, in the areas of our life where we are privileged, we can all learn to compassionately listen to those who in those areas of our life are marginalized or excluded. And, in the areas of our identities that others consider less than, this story calls us to push back and hold accountable those who consider us less than, no matter who they are. Even if they are Jesus.

In the second story in this week’s passage, we have the story of a deaf and mute man. This story is omitted in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Some Jesus scholars think it may be because the story sounds too magical for later Jesus communities. Jesus puts his fingers in this man’s ears, spits, touches the mans tongue, and speaks an Aramaic word. It’s a strange healing story, no doubt, and it’s only here in Mark. I understand why later versions of the Jesus story simply leave it out.

But this story in our reading provides us with the opportunity to talk about ableism and considering or treating people with disabilities as inferior.

In Jesus’ society, people with certain disabilities were put in a marginalized and disenfranchised economic, social, and political position. And this week’s story doesn’t challenge that economic system that exploited the vulnerable and excluded the deaf and mute. It also doesn’t center those with disabilities and their right to self-determination and to change a system that practiced discrimination in favor of able-bodied people. Instead, this story makes a person more able-bodied so they could survive and be included in a discriminatory, competitive system. Rather than making the system more fair, this healing simply places the person in an equal place of opportunity to compete. Mark will critique and call for change of the system elsewhere in this version of the Jesus story(Mark 10:17-23). But this is not one of those times. Equal opportunity in a system that creates winners and losers is not the same as creating a system where everyone wins together and there are no more losers.

As Jesus followers seeking ways to make our world a more compassionate and just home for everyone, we can do better than what this story offers. Let me explain.

People who live with disabilities are not “less than.” And we also live in a system that practices discrimination against disabled people in favor of able-bodied people. It’s an ableist system. Ableism characterizes people by their disabilities and classifies disabled people as people who are inferior to non-disabled people. Where medicine and technology can grant people with disabilities with greater ability, people should be able to choose what to use, within their right of self-determination. We also have a long way to go make our world, communities, and larger society more accessible physically, socially, economically, and politically for those in our human family who live with disabilities.

As Jesus followers, we can also practice greater care and intention than those who have told these stories before us. In the Jesus stories, we encounter a Jesus who often (except for in the case of this one Greek woman) practiced a preferential option for people with disabilities. And that is the part of the story we can hold on to. Where we need to be careful is where disabilities in the gospels are used as metaphors for sin, evil, or wickedness. An example of what I’m talking about is where gospel stories use blindness as a pejorative metaphor against people who reject Jesus (Matthew 15:14; Luke 6:39). This denigrates those people who live every day of their lives with actual blindness.

For Christians acculturated to accept the ableism in the gospels, leaving ableism behind will take effort. But the effort is worth it. I used to use the phrase “blind-spots” to describe when I or folks I interacted with had a limited outlook on an intrinsically harmful practice. Today I want to respect those in my life who live with limited vision. Rather than using phrases that harm them or imply villainy, I now just say what I mean: instead of saying a person has a “blind spot” I simply say their understanding and experience is limited and needs to expand. The story about Jesus and his interaction with the Greek woman is a great example.

Today we need more than magical cures that enable people to do better in our economy’s game of Monopoly. We need a world where there are no more winners and losers and we all win together. Others don’t need to lose for us to win. We can all thrive, genuinely, at the same time. And all of this is part of what it means to be be striving in our spheres of influence to make our world we share a safe, compassionate and just home for everyone. It’s a beautifully challenging work. And one I’m thankful to be engaged in.

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. What are some examples of where you experience the intersectionality of living simultaneously in different social locations in your own life? Share and discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 25: Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23. Lectionary B, Proper 16

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

This week:

Season 1 Episode 21: Jesus, a Greek Woman and a Magical Cure

Mark 7:24-36

“Intersectionality is such a rich lens through which to relate to this Jesus story as we consider how it may inform our justice work today. We each occupy intersecting social positions within our own society’s systems, where we can simultaneously be both oppressor and oppressed. Our privilege or disadvantage intersects depending on different aspects of our identities in relation to society. This story illustrates how, in the areas where we hold privilege, we can learn to listen with compassion to those who are marginalized or excluded in those same areas. At the same time, in aspects of our identity where we are deemed “less than” by others, the story encourages us to stand up and hold accountable those who diminish us—no matter who they are, even if it’s Jesus.”

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/jesus-a-greek-woman-and-a-magical-cure

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

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Morality, Culture Wars, and Consent

Posted on September 1, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

Thank You!

If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”

Herb Montgomery, August 31, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark.

The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)

So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”

He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:

“ ‘These people honor me with their lips,

but their hearts are far from me.

They worship me in vain;

their teachings are merely human rules.’

You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.” . . .

Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them . . . For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.” (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23)

The first thing that jumps out to me (because We spent so much time in August in the gospel of John. The first thing that jumps out to me in Mark is who it defines as opposing the Jesus movement. In John, it’s Jesus versus Jews in general. It’s Christianity versus Judaism. We have discussed at length how harmful this Christian anti-semitic trope has been and continues to be.

In Mark, however, the narrative is Jesus versus Pharisees. The debate is within Jewish society, an argument between Jewish voices arguing with other Jewish voices.

Nonetheless, in the same way that John overgeneralizes and lumps all Jews together, Mark overgeneralizes and lumps all Pharisees together. This has led many Christians to use the term “Pharisee” as a pejorative term. That is anti-semitic, and Christians today need to stop using the term Pharisee as a negative. The Pharisees were a religio-political party whose members held a spectrum of beliefs. Pharisees in the House of Shammai were at one end of the spectrum and were the most restrictive. Pharisees in the House of Hillel were on the other end of the spectrum and defined Torah observance as love, and specifically love of neighbor. After the time of Jesus, the school of Hillel became the dominant group in the Pharisees and later evolved into Rabbinic Judaism. It interpreted the entire Torah through the lens of how one treated their neighbor. Jesus’ teachings (with the exception of debt cancellation and divorce) were much the same as the Hillelian Pharisees in this regard. The debate we encounter in Mark 7 is with Pharisees on the most outwardly restrictive end of the spectrum.

The Pharisees were just one of many religio-political groups at the time of Jesus who competed for social authority and positions of influence and power. Isenberg gives us a window into understanding the social context of our reading this week:

“The Pharisees, as other groups, engaged in interpretation of the written Torah…[but] distinguished themselves from other groups by a peculiar claim for the authority of their traditions and, by extension, for the authority of the Pharisaic tradents. They established their right to interpret authoritatively by placing themselves in a chain of tradition going back to the original revelation of Torah at Mt. Sinai and then by putting the contents of their interpretive activities into that very revelation. This they did by telling a myth which reports that both Written and Oral Law were revealed on Mt. Sinai…. Such claims to authority put them implicitly in competition with the other groups that claimed and had legislative authority, the priests and their supporters, the Sadducees…. It is reasonable to assume that they clashed on the matter of the Oral Law, and there is reasonable evidence from Josephus and the rabbinic literature to support the assumption. Certainly the matter was worth disputing since the outcome of the argument established who had control over the redemptive media in Jewish Palestine (Isenberg, quoted in Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, pp. 220-221)

Another thing that may be difficult for us to wrap our heads around today is that the practice of washing in our reading was before the discovery of germ theory. Perhaps people in that culture noticed a link between people who got sick and those who didn’t wash their hands before eating. The sect of Pharisees we are reading about this week had ritualized the practice of washing one’s hands and attached moral value and worth to it. It was not simply a health practice. It was a practice within a set of behaviors that defined whether the person washing their hands was themself was morally pure or unclean.

In our reading this week, Jesus contrasts the inconsistency of being fastidiousness about hand washing while having utter disregard for the moral demand of caring for one’s parents in their old age:

And he continued, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God)—then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.” (Mark 7:9-13)

Next in our reading, we encounter Jesus discussing the practice with his disciples:

After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.) (Mark 7:17-19)

Here, Jesus moves the focus from outward washing to what is transpiring on the inside of a person. “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them . . . For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come.”

Then Mark lists behaviors that actually defined morality in the community for whom this gospel was written. Morality, remember, is socially defined. Morality begins with what a culture defines as right and wrong, as good or bad behavior. Individuals then decide what they define as moral behavior in agreement with or in contrast to the morality of their culture. Some moral positions have been proven to bring harm intrinsically, and are present within all cultures. Other moral issues have been deemed harmful by specific cultures and are only prohibited in those cultures. We can learn a lot by listening to the morality of other cultures as they can reveal things our own culture has yet to learn. Listening to others has the power to reveal to us areas where, as in our reading this week, we may be disregarding something that is intrinsically harmful while prohibiting things that are intrinsically life-giving. How many times have we grown up to discover that something we thought was wrong wasn’t harmful at all while those things we used to deem as perfectly fine in reality were hurting or damaging us? It’s helpful for those of us living in religious or theistic cultures to remember that something is not wrong simply because our God said so. Something can be deemed wrong because it is intrinsically harmful and some things have been mislabeled by all cultures.

What first hints to me that Mark’s list was shaped by its culture is the inclusion of “adultery.” At the time this was written, adultery was not egalitarian. The concern was never for a woman whose husband may have cheated on her, as our culture often defines adultery today. Adultery was defined only as when a man engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman who was betrothed or already married to another man. Adultery did not refer to sex with a single woman. It only concerned itself with the property rights of the man to whom the woman belonged (see The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, vol. 4). This is because the culture making this list was deeply patriarchal. Today, many of us have experienced how deeply destructive a culture and practice of patriarchy intrinsically is. Adultery can still be part of our morality discussion today, but we should define it in more egalitarian ways to honor the rights of all partners, to all people in marital or committed relationships deeply harmed by the un-consented, violating fracture of those commitments.

Culturally, it’s still easy for us today to say amen to most items of this list. Some of them are universal. Things like theft, murder, greed, malice, deceit, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly (recklessness) are things that many of us could still agree violate the golden rule of treating others the way we would like to be treated and doing no harm to other people. Where we get into culture wars today is in how to define sexual immorality and lewdness. I find it ironic that those who are quick to accusing others of sexual immorality are most often guilty themselves of the immorality of arrogance. And however we land on what we define to be sexually immoral or lewd, our own sexual ethic should at least include consent and the practice of doing no harm. Too often what certain sectors of Christianity define as sexually immoral is between two consenting adults and hurts no one. We must ground discussion on what is and isn’t sexually immoral on a definition of morality that looks at the intrinsic results of the behaviors in question, not just imposed dogma. Is something intrinsically death-dealing or is it life-giving and mislabelled? We too often turn our gaze and pretend not to notice things that are intrinsically death-dealing while we scrutinize and forbid behaviors that intrinsically do no harm.

So, while holding in our hands the golden rule, let’s begin a discussion on consent. Genuine consent has five foundational qualities. It must be ongoing. Anyone can change their mind about what they are doing at any time, and so consent can be retracted at any time. Consent must be freely given. Someone’s yes must be offered without them feeling pressured, forced, or afraid to say no. Consent must be specific. Saying yes to one act doesn’t mean you’ve said yes to others. Consent must be enthusiastic. This means actually wanting to do something, and not feeling like you should or that you have to do something. And lastly consent is informed. Consent is violated by lying or deceiving someone. (For more info see https://www.nsvrc.org/)

Beginning any discussion on sexual immorality at the much deeper level discussion of consent, sets us up for a discussion that many raised in Christian purity culture have never had. Discussions on consent allow us to uncover a more holistic way of understanding and defining sexual morality.

Consent is an egalitarian discussion. It doesn’t privilege any gender above another, or penalize one while ignoring others. Beginning the discussion of what is sexually moral and what is sexually immoral with discussion of consent includes us all.

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. If you were to rewrite the internal list here at the end of our reading this week for us today, what would your internal list include? Share and discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 25: Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23. Lectionary B, Proper 16

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

This week:

Season 1 Episode 20: Morality, Culture Wars, and Consent

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

“Where we get into culture wars today is in how to define sexual immorality. I find it ironic that those who are quick to accusing others of sexual immorality are most often guilty themselves of the immorality of arrogance on this list. And however we land on what we define to be sexually immoral or lewd, our own sexual ethic should at least include consent and the practice of doing no harm. Too often what certain sectors of Christianity define as sexually immoral is between two consenting adults and hurts no one. We must ground discussion on what is and isn’t sexually immoral on a definition of morality that looks at the intrinsic results of the behaviors in question, not just imposed dogma. Is something intrinsically death-dealing or is it life-giving and mislabelled? We too often turn our gaze and pretend not to notice things that are intrinsically death-dealing while we scrutinize and forbid behaviors that intrinsically do no harm. So, while holding in our hands the golden rule, let’s begin a discussion on consent. Consent is an egalitarian discussion. It doesn’t privilege any gender above another, or penalize one while ignoring others. Beginning the discussion of what is sexually moral and what is sexually immoral with discussion of consent includes us all.”

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/morality-culture-wars-and-consent

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

Available now on Audible!

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Right Now Matters

Posted on August 24, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

Thank You!

If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”

Herb Montgomery, August 24, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

This is our last reading from the lectionary this month from chapter 6 of John:

“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” [Jesus] said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”

Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.”

From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.

Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:56-69)

This is our last lectionary week in John for a while. Next week, the lectionary returns to the gospel of Mark. We have spent the last four weeks not simply in the gospel of John, but specifically in one chapter, John 6. This final passage sums up the four messages of that chapter.

The first message is a prescription to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink his blood. The second denigrates physically feeding the multitude or meeting people’s material, concrete needs: “Your ancestors ate the manna and died.” The third exalts the Spirit over our material existence. And the fourth emphasizes that our flesh, body, and material existence in this world “counts for nothing.”

We have spent the last four weeks contrasting this way of characterizing Jesus and his ministry with the way Mark, Matthew and Luke characterize them. The Jewish Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke would not have used the language of eating his flesh and drinking his or any blood. Consider the following cultural prohibitions against ingesting blood:

“This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, wherever you live: ‘You must not eat any fat or any blood.’” (Leviticus 3:17)

“And wherever you live, you must not eat the blood of any bird or animal. Anyone who eats blood must be cut off from their people.” (Leviticus 7:26)

“I will set my face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood, and I will cut them off from the people. For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life. Therefore I say to the Israelites, ‘None of you may eat blood, nor may any foreigner residing among you eat blood.’ . . . You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off.” (Leviticus 17:10-14)

Drinking or eating blood, even drinking blood “that makes atonement,” was a foreign idea.

It’s also problematic to devalue the work of meeting people’s material needs like Moses did by feeding a multitude of people with manna during the exodus, Jesus did with loaves and fish, or as many today do through soup kitchens today. This is the tension that exists between the present and future. Some people say our lives don’t matter because we are all going to end up dead. Others, even those who are non-religious, say that ultimately dying doesn’t negate how meaningful present realities are. These things may or may not have meaning in the future, but they all still have meaning right now. In the present, we are alive, and what what we are experiencing means much to each one of us. It betrays a deep lack of compassion to say someone’s experience of hunger right now doesn’t matter because it may or may not matter in the future.

The choices we make today also affect what other people are experiencing right now, and can spill over into generations to come after we are gone. Over the last hundred years alone, so many who are no longer living made discoveries and choices that benefit all of us today. To say that our present realities don’t matter because we will one day die (or that one day billions of years from now the sun is going to burn out) is a very stunted way of looking at our existence. What we are encountering in John is simply a Christianized version of this way of looking at our material existence.

I grew up in churches that would put on charity programs, not in the liberation spirit of the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke but more in the spirit of the Jesus we find in John 6. This kind of charity work was only temporary and only for the purpose of harvesting leads for upcoming evangelistic events. Saving souls was much more important than saving bodies, and that logic was rooted in the thinking we find in John 6. In the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), we don’t see a Jesus who is only concerned with people’s eternal well-being but one who was also deeply troubled with concern for people’s present, material, concrete well being. The multitudes who ate the loaves and fish still died! But this didn’t stop Jesus from feeling compassion for their hunger and desiring to feed them. The Jesus of the synoptics is different from the Jesus of John. John’s Jesus is all about getting people connected with the Spirit so they can have eternal life, while the synoptic Jesus is deeply concerned with liberating people, especially marginalized people, from lives in which they lacked things essential for well-being like food and warmth.

Stop and contemplate Luke’s Jesus for a moment. Luke’s author could have characterized Jesus’ ministry in so many ways but chose a passage from Isaiah and the Hebrew prophetic justice tradition:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners

and recovery of sight for the blind,

to set the oppressed free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)

The poor, the imprisoned, the disabled, the oppressed—these were who Luke’s gospel was for. The Jesus of Luke doesn’t just offer them eternal life as an opiate that enables them to patiently endure their present experience. He doesn’t tell them that their present experience in the big scheme of things “counted for nothing.” What Luke’s gospel offered these people was proclamation of the “year of the Lord’s favor,” the year of jubilee when all debts were forgiven and wealth was redistributed, emancipation was given to those enslaved, and all those who had been oppressed were liberated.

I understand that the Johannine community was estimating the worth of the eternal life they believed could be found in Jesus. But we don’t need to say our material experience counts for nothing in order to do that. Dualistically dividing our existence into categories of things of the spirit and things of the flesh and then saying the fleshy stuff counts for nothing has produced untold harm throughout Christian history. Our bodies matter. Our present moments matter. Today we can do better.

Today, in the spirit of the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, we can say that what we are experiencing right now does matter. Here and now matters. The kind of society we are choosing to form right now matters for all who are alive right now. We are not just passing through! We cannot allow ourselves to become so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good, or to put it in John’s language, so eternity minded that we are not presently any good.

Christianity that is only concerned with the future and not concerned with the present is not only insipid, but also become vulnerable to being coopted by those who use Christianity to harm people today while passing out tickets for eternal life.

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. Why does right now matter to you? Share and discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 25: John 6.56-69. Lectionary B, Proper 16

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

This week:

Season 1 Episode 19: Right Now Matters

John 6:56-69

“These things may or may not have meaning in the future, but they all still have meaning right now. In the present, we are alive, and what we are experiencing right now means much to each of us. It betrays a deep lack of compassion to say someone’s experience of hunger, for example, right now doesn’t matter because it may or may not matter in the future. What we are encountering in John is simply a Christianized version of this way of looking at our material existence. The future will come. But right now, we are alive. We live in this moment. Our material existence does matter. Injustice, oppression, violence, and suffering matter. Love for those who are experiencing these realities demands that they matter.”

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/right-now-matters

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

Available now on Audible!

Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?

Free Sign Up Here

The Evolution of the Eucharist

Posted on August 17, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

Thank You!

If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”

Herb Montgomery, August 17, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our reading this week is from the gospel of John:

I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”

Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”

Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” (John 6:51-58)

Our reading this week is the Johannine’s community’s nod to the Eucharist. In John’s gospel, Jesus’ last supper (John 13) is quite unique from Mark’s, Matthew’s and Luke’s descriptions.

There is no blessing of a cup. There is no breaking of bread. There is only a story of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. This foot washing does not appear any of the other gospels’ accounts of the last supper, and only in our reading this week in John is Jesus’ body and blood something to be consumed.

I appreciate the work of Jesus scholars who point out the evolution that the Eucharist went through in the early Jesus movement. One example is John Dominic Crossan’s book, The Historical Jesus The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. In this book, Crossan puts forward five possible evolutionary stages the Eucharist went through in the early Jesus moment.

In the Greco-Roman culture of Jesus’ time, “bread and wine” was short-hand, a colloquial term for a formal meal. And when formal meals were eaten as a group, they conveyed meaning and a social structure, showing the group boundaries for who was part of the group and who wasn’t, and defining identity, mutuality, and relationships within the group.

The second stage is the way Jesus practiced table fellowship. The Jesus of the synoptics practiced open, radical, social egalitarianism in his table fellowship. This practice by Jesus is where the early Jesus movement derived its approach to shared meals. We see an early form of these shared meals by the Jesus community in the Didache where, at this stage of the meal’s evolution, it was a communal meal shared in thankfulness. Take note of the words and meaning associated with the bread and the cup:

“First concerning the Cup. “We give thanks to thee, our Father, for the Holy Vine of David thy child, which thou didst make known to us through Jesus thy child; to thee be glory for ever.” And concerning the broken Bread: “We give thee thanks, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou didst make known to us through Jesus thy child. To thee be glory for ever.” (Didache 9:2–3)

In this stage, the cup represented the fruit of the vine, the community that Jesus had grafted followers into and all the blessing this community brought into their lives. The bread was a symbol of the knowledge and life they had gained through Jesus’ teachings and life.

This was a communal meal where those who had food shared with those who didn’t and everyone had enough. This resonates with what we find being practiced in the book of Acts where:

“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.” (Acts 2:44-46)

This ultimately created the kind of community where “there were no needy persons among them” (Acts 4:34).

At these stages, this “bread and wine” shared meal was still about mutuality and resource-sharing, using community to alleviate need and materially save the marginalized and disenfranchised. As a church instructional document, the Didache does not define the bread and wine as symbols of Jesus’ death or dying but as what Jesus followers gain by practicing Jesus’ teachings together as a community.

In 1 Corinthians 10-11, we encounter the earliest reference in our canon to the Eucharist meal. Unlike the Didache, Paul’s letter mentions another way of practicing this meal among the early Jesus communities. This practice, for better or worse, was more ritualized, and it appropriated the Greco-Roman phrase “bread and wine” to represent Jesus’ body and blood:

“The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 11:23-26)

This is the description most Christians are familiar with today, but we should acknowledge how different this is from how the Didache speaks of the bread and wine. The early Jesus community was far from monolithic and what we see here is two ways of understanding and eating the Eucharist meal that coexisted alongside each other. Even in Paul’s letter, we encounter the strong sense of egalitarianism that should be practiced in this way of participating in the sacred supper. Paul describes how the Corinthians were failing this standard:

“So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk.” (1 Corinthians 11:20-21)

Note that Paul teaches not that they return to a practice of resource-sharing as we encounter in Acts, but rather “you should all eat together, and anyone who is hungry should eat something at home” (1 Corinthians 11:33-34). This is very different from both the Didache and the book of Acts. Paul’s correction is not that that the meal should be shared so that no one is hungry but that if anyone is hungry they should eat before showing up. We have now moved from an open, common meal (bread and wine) as a practice of resource-sharing and eliminating need within the community during the lifetime of Jesus to a meal practiced as a religious ritual where the Greco-Roman bread and wine are ritual memorial symbols of Jesus’ broken body (bread) and spilt blood (wine).

The gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke were all written after Paul’s letters and express this later ritualized meaning of Jesus’ last supper with his apostles, although even in Luke we see variations ways of practicing the ritual among some Jesus followers being represented.

The early Jesus community’s shared meal evolved away from a meal of real bread and fish among a hungry crowd of Jewish Jesus followers where open mutuality and sharing resulted in baskets of food left over. It became a ritualized meal appropriating the Greco-Roman “bread and wine” and symbolizing Jesus’ death among Christians. This evolution happened as Jesus followers’ social locations changed. What had begun as a Jewish peasant movement became more affluent by the time the gospels were written down. And as the church’s social location continued to transition toward prosperity, privilege, and power there would be many other changes in the Jesus movement as well. This may give us insight as to why so many expressions of Christianity today are strangely silent on matters of economic justice while engaged only in acts of philanthropic charity.

What can we glean from all of this today? Social location matters. How would it transform Christianity today for us to interpret the Jesus story once again from the perspective of communities that are marginalized and disenfranchised. I think of Jesus followers today who live their lives on the margins of their society and how differently they interpret the Jesus stories from those in more economically and socially privileged social locations. As I consider how the Eucharist changed over two millennia of Christian tradition and arguments still waged over bread and wine, body and blood, and theologies of the meaning of Jesus death, I still believe all of this distracts us from practicing the actual teachings of the Jesus of our stories. These practices that eliminated need among the early community (Acts 4:34). I can’t help but wonder, in a world so filled with need today, what would happen if we Jesus followers de-evolved our Jesus story and returned back to the interpretations of those living on the edges and margins? Could Jesus’ teachings once again return to the intrinsic, life-giving relevancy once encountered by those who first listened to the words of this Jewish prophet of the poor from Galilee?

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. How does the ritual of Eucharist shape your own Jesus following and social engagement today? Share and discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 24: John 6.51-58. Lectionary B, Proper 15

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

https://youtu.be/FCHmsbosSxc?si=3sLHd_r7I3cOVuMl

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

This week:

Season 1 Episode 18: The Evolution of the Eucharist

John 6:51-58

“The early Jesus community’s shared meal evolved away from a meal of real bread and fish among a hungry crowd of Jewish Jesus followers where open mutuality and sharing resulted in baskets of food left over. It became a ritualized meal appropriating the Greco-Roman “bread and wine” and symbolizing Jesus’ death among Christians. This evolution happened as Jesus followers’ social locations changed. What had begun as a Jewish peasant movement became more affluent by the time the gospels were written down. And as the church’s social location continued to transition toward prosperity, privilege, and power there would be many other changes in the Jesus movement as well.”

Available on all major podcast carriers and at:

Ecological Justice, Economic Justice, Feminism, Immigration Justice, Racial Justice, LGBTQ Justice,

Liberation Theology, Lectionary Reading, Social Justice, Bread and Cup, Eucharist, Johnhttps://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/the-evolution-of-the-eucharist

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

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The Bread of Life

Posted on August 10, 2024 by Herb Montgomery

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Herb Montgomery, August 10, 2024

If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:

Our lectionary reading from the gospels this week is from the gospel of John:

Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”

“Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” (John 6:35, 41-51)

Any responsible commentary on the gospel of John must repeatedly correct the way the Jews as a whole are repeatedly villainized over and over again in the gospel of John. During the years this gospel was written, this was a debate on the inside of the Jewish community between varying Jewish voices. Christianity was separating from its Jewish roots and seeking to distinguish itself for political reasons. As benign as some commentators say that separation may have been originally, John Dominic Crossan rightly demonstrates that the rhetoric by Christians against the Jewish community would become lethal once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

As long as Christians were the marginalized and disenfranchised ones, such passion fiction about Jewish responsibility and Roman innocence did nobody much harm. But, once the Roman Empire became Christian, that fiction turned lethal . . . Externally, records of pagan contempt and records of pagan respect for Judaism started as soon as Greek culture and Roman power integrated in eastern Mediterranean into a somewhat united whole. Internally, divergent groups within Judaism opposed to one another in those same centuries with everything from armed opposition through rhetorical attacks to nasty name calling. Read, for example, Josephus on any other Jews he dislikes, or read the Qumran Essenes of Dead Sea Scrolls fame on those other Jews they opposed. Christianity began as a sect within Judaism and, here slowly, there swiftly, separated itself to become eventually a distinct religion. If all this had stayed on the religious level, each side could have accused and denigrated the other quite safely forever. But, by fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and with the dawn of Christian Europe, anti-Judaism moved from theological debate to lethal possibility. (John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?)

Especially when reading John, we must be honest about the narratives of Jewish rejection and Roman innocence found in this gospel. John’s version of the Jesus story has led to untold harm from Christians to the Jewish community throughout the centuries. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus is opposed by the powerful, propertied, and privileged within the Jewish Temple State and loved and embraced by the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised Jewish populace. In John, the story becomes flattened and Jesus is opposed by the Jewish community as a whole. In the synoptics, Jesus debates with other Jewish voices within Judaism, a Jewish voice arguing with Jewish voices. In John, his debates move outside of Judaism, a debate of Christians versus Jews. And once we add the later backing of the Roman Empire and later European countries, John’s gospel sows the seeds that would grow into full blown anti-semitism and eventually the Holocaust of six million European Jews and eleven million others in the 20th century. Supremacism never stays where it starts. The myth of Jewish rejection and Roman innocence must be rejected by responsible Jesus followers today.

What can we glean from this week’s reading in John?

This week’s reading is a reminder of how John’s gospel tends to spiritualize the material, minimize the material, and lift up Jesus—not as an agent of change in our material world but as the means whereby we can escape or transcend our material world including death:

“Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die.”

What this week’s reading draws our focus to once again is how important it is that our Jesus following is more than a way to manage the end of our lives or reconcile us to the fact that we will die. Jesus following that has become mere death management is, ironically, death-dealing. Jesus following should call us to consider how we live while we are alive! Jesus following focused only on navigating our dying intrinsically and negatively affects by omission how we live our lives, shape our communities, create societies, and the larger world each of us lives in. When our Jesus following is only about saving souls in an effort to manage our fear of dying, too often we become oblivious to the marginalization and material injustice, oppression, and violence many are suffering today. We become disengaged from the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone and our insipid focus becomes only about getting to heaven. This way of following Jesus is almost wholly unrecognizable from the Jesus story we read about in Mark, Matthew, and Luke where Jesus is much more engaged with people’s lives. Yes, John’s gospel is all about how Jesus transforms death into a portal to life. But the synoptics’ Jesus is all about saving people from the hell they are enduring right now!

The kind of Jesus following that is only about managing fear of death is also convenient for those in positions of power who benefit and are privileged by unjust systems and ways of shaping our societies. Death-management-only Christianity leaves unjust systems unchallenged, unchanged, and thus untouched. This is why a heaven-focused version of Christianity is often promoted by people in power. They know that a Christianity that is other-world-focused leaves this world, their world, unchanged. I’m reminded of the words of Howard Thurman: “The opposition to those who work for social change does not come only from those who are the guarantors of the status quo. Again and again it has been demonstrated that the lines are held by those whose hold on security is sure only as long as the status quo remains intact.” (Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 14)

We would do well to remember that people don’t get beheaded like John for only showing people a path to heaven. People don’t get crucified like Jesus for only passing out tickets to heaven. People meet those ends when they become a threat to the powerful within the status quo.

All of this reminds me that a gospel of love must be engaged in our material world. A gospel of love calls us not to minimize the importance of our material world, but, rooted and grounded in our gospel of love, to work to shape our world into a just place for everyone. Believing in a gospel of love summons us to the work of compassion, not just pulling people out of the harm our society too often plunges them in, but reshaping our society in ways that also mitigate or entirely remove that harm to begin with.

I’ll close this week with the words of Walter Rauschenbusch, a key figure in the Social Gospel movement of early 20th centuries, for your consideration. Though the Social Gospel movement was woefully silent on matters of racial justice, today we can choose to engage justice work much more inclusively, including issues of race, women’s rights, LGBTQ justice, and more.

Rauschenbusch reminds us that when we allow our Jesus following and our belief in a gospel of love to move us to engage our material world around us, this is simply “the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified. The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith in the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes to him. But it has not given us an adequate understanding of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it. It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion. Both our sense of sin and our faith in salvation have fallen short of the realities under its teaching. The social gospel seeks to bring humans under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience. It calls on us for the faith of the old prophets who believed in the salvation of nations” (Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 5-6)

Discussion Group Questions

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.

2. How is your following Jesus about more than what happens to us in an afterlife? How does your Jesus following define how you show up in our world here and now? Share and discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!

Season 2, Episode 23: John 6.35, 41-51. Lectionary B, Proper 14

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out at:

New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast

This week:

Season 1 Episode 17: The Bread of Life

John 6:35, 41-51

“The kind of Jesus following that is only about managing fear of death is also convenient for those in positions of power who benefit and are privileged by unjust systems and ways of shaping our societies. Death-management-only Christianity leaves unjust systems unchallenged, unchanged, and thus untouched. This is why a heaven-focused version of Christianity is often promoted by people in power. They know that a Christianity that is other-world-focused leaves this world, their world, unchanged. Faith that has become mere death management is, ironically, death-dealing. Faith should first do no harm. It should call us to consider how we show up in our world while we are alive and inspire us to shape our shared world into a compassionate, safe home for everyone.”

Available on all major podcast carriers,

Or at this link:

https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/the-bread-of-life

Now Available on Audible!

Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.

by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon

Available now on Audible!

Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?

Free Sign Up Here