August 30, 2009
The Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time

SERIOUSLY, NOT LITERALLY
Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23

If you really want to understand what people are saying to you, you need to take what they say seriously, and not just literally. Too often, we do just the opposite.

I doubt that there is a parent here today who has not become furious with his or her child after being taken literally, but not seriously. The child says, “You told me to check and see if the dog had been fed. I did and she hadn’t. How was I to know you wanted me to feed her?” Or the teenager, an hour late for dinner, says, “Yes, I heard you say that I should call if I were going to be late, and I did call but the line was busy. Is that my fault?”

It makes me think of the girl who said to her date, “My mother said she would worry if I let you kiss me on our first date, so I’ll kiss you and let your mother worry!”

These are examples of being taken literally, but not seriously. It makes us furious when people use our literal words as an excuse for ignoring our meaning.

What may not be as obvious is when parents do the same thing to their children, and I suspect that it happens just as often. When a small child says to her mother, “I hate you!” she doesn’t mean by that all the horrible things that the word “hate” means in the mother’s mind. But she is serious! She means that at that moment she is about as angry as she can be. However, she also means that she trusts her mother very much. She trusts her negative feelings to her mother without fearing that her mother will stop loving her. If the mother reacts by telling her what an awful little girl she is for saying such a horrible, hurtful thing to her, the child is less likely to be as trusting with her feelings in the future.

Taking people literally is often a refusal to take them seriously, a refusal to deal with the real meaning they are trying to communicate. It happens in all our relationships. Husbands and wives know what it is to throw words back and forth, with no communication. And there are powerful reasons why this happens.

For one thing, we fool ourselves. We give ourselves the impression that we are taking someone seriously when we are taking them literally. Actually, we are dealing with them on the most superficial of levels. It is much easier just to receive someone’s words and throw them back than it is to deal with their meanings. Understanding their meanings means we have to open up, be vulnerable, be responsible.

In addition, taking other people’s meanings seriously might require more than we are willing to give -- perhaps more than we feel capable of giving. The result is that many of our life’s relationships are pretty superficial. They are so fragile that even the routine storms of life threaten to overwhelm them.

And, what we do to other people, we do to Jesus Christ, and for the same reason. We take Jesus literally, but not seriously, to relieve ourselves of the responsibility of actually dealing with him, and with what he would tell us.

The Gospels give us many examples of people doing just that. A man once asked Jesus what he had to do to have eternal life. Jesus asked him what his own reading of the Scriptures offered as an answer to that question. The man knew his Torah, and he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus said, “That’s it! Do this and you will live!”

But the man was crafty. He recognized that taking the commandments seriously placed a big responsibility on him. He was looking for a loophole, so he said back to Jesus, “Be more specific, Rabbi; just who is my neighbor?”

Well, Jesus wasn’t about to play word games, and so he answered the question with the story of the Good Samaritan. At the close of the story, he turned to the man and asked, “Which one of these proved neighbor to the man who fell among robbers?” There was no way out of that one. The meaning was crystal clear. The literalist could only say, “The one who showed mercy on him.” Jesus replied, “Go, and do likewise.”

Jesus concludes the Sermon on the Mount with very similar words. He challenges people to “hear” his words, and to “do” them. In essence, he is saying, “Now, are you going to take me seriously, or are you going to listen politely, nod your head in sage agreement with the truth of my words, and then ignore it all?”

That is the question of Christian discipleship. What Jesus says isn’t really all that hard to understand. What is hard is taking him seriously.

Scripture presents Jesus and his teaching as the only foundation on which a life may be built securely. But he does not become our foundation by the literal recitation of a few pat Biblical phrases. The Christian faith cannot be condensed into three sentences or four spiritual laws, because Jesus must be taken seriously. More than lip service is required. The needs of our day are urgent. Dare we stand there and ask, “Can you tell me more specifically just who my neighbor is?”
One great word Jesus speaks to us is that we are loved. Have you ever really taken that word seriously, as any more than a sing-song rhyme you learned as a child? Have you ever really tried discovering what it means to live as a person who is loved by God? That is serious business! Have you ever really taken God’s love for you seriously?

Another great word Jesus speaks to us is that we are to love as we have been loved by him. Have you ever really taken that word seriously? It means taking other people as Christ takes us -- seriously, listening to their meanings, accepting their fears and longings, sharing life with them. It means believing in the triumph of love over hate. It means believing that God is at work in the world, bringing God’s purposes to be, and sharing that hope with a world caught in the grips of despair.

Jesus appears so weak to a world built on a profit-and-loss ledger, and on utilitarianism and rationalism -- on what works and what makes sense! He was never able to say in one literal phrase just what he meant by “the kingdom of God.” He said it was like a tenant farmer plowing in his field and finding a buried treasure, or like a father joyfully welcoming his foolish son back home. If you try to make literal sense out of these images, you get no where. They are efforts to say something that cannot be said literally: THIS IS HOW MUCH I LOVE YOU.

The literalists seem to be the rock. Their arguments often appear stronger than faith, just as the military might of Rome appeared to be so much stronger than that one man hanging on the cross, bleeding, dying. But it is that man, and not Rome, who has survived the wars and epidemics and revolutions of the last 2,000 years! The storms continue to come, but that man continues to live! And he offers his life to us, and to all humankind, and he offers it as we need it to be offered -- seriously!