The Wages of Goodness and the Reign of God
Proper 24 B
Art by John August Swanson
You don’t need to venture very far from the illusory shelter of bourgeois comfortability to see that the world—the one we’ve made, or at least helped make—is quite the hot mess. I’m not just talking about politicians and pundits saying stupid things, telling stupendous lies, and scapegoating immigrants for imaginary crimes, as bad as all that may be. There is also a steady stream of horrific injustices being done, frequently to the most vulnerable members of the human family: Extreme weather events have led to a famine in Somalia that has left four million people, nearly half of them children, suffering acute malnutrition. More than ten thousand children have died in the war between Israel and Hamas, and as many as two thousand have been killed or injured in Ukraine. Here in the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, as much as ten per cent of the population lives in food insecurity. And this is to say nothing of the fact that global temperatures, the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the incidence of extreme weather events all continue to climb, even as we continue to spend and consume from the comfort of our couches. In this we exemplify Pope Francis’s characterization of the “haves” of our time. He says, “The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase. In the meantime, all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us” (Evangelii Gaudium, ¶ 54).
But here’s the thing: once we see the world as it is and glimpse the many ways it is broken and learn of its many injustices, we can no longer pretend they don’t exist. The self-deception that we can continue to live as we please becomes unsustainable, and we find ourselves staring into the face of a crisis. The broken world asks, “so, what are you gonna do?” and we—I, anyway—stand dry-mouthed and speechless, unable to imagine a defensible answer. What am I going to do?
Contemplating this question, which is something I find myself doing more than I like these days, has led me to re-read Michael Blumenthal’s poem, “And the Wages of Goodness Are Not Assured,” which reminds us that injustice and the suffering it brings are as old as humankind. Blumenthal writes of Jacob, “who stole his own brother’s blessing / and lived to triumph from it.” Of Cain, “who slew the sleeping Abel.” And finally of Job, who “suffered so long amid the racked syllables / of his own believing.” In so broken a world, where exploitation, oppression, and suffering are rampant and “the wages of goodness are oblique and obscure and not even assured in some happy ending,” we—or again, I—are tempted to two equally unsatisfactory responses, namely despair or rage, screaming clench-fisted into the abyss or setting out clench-jawed to take names and kick asses and clean up this mess.
This week’s lectionary suggests we think twice before embracing either of these possibilities. If we read the texts stereoscopically, allowing the passages from Job, Isaiah, and Hebrews to provide depth to the Gospel story, we see that they offer a radically distinct third way of being in a broken world, the way of God’s reign of shalōm. The Gospel story, from Mark, affords a way of seeing the way of the kingdom in contrast to the ways of the world; as is often the case in the Gospels, it is the disciples who unwittingly represent the latter.
The story is familiar. Jesus and the disciples have travelled from Galilee to Judea and the Transjordan, where Jesus has been teaching the crowds. Eventually, they turned toward Jerusalem, with Jesus walking alone out in front of his followers, who were disturbed by this apparent aloofness. Mark says nothing about how long this detachment lasted or what led Jesus to return to the disciples or allow them to catch up to him, but at some point, he spoke privately to the twelve. “Look,” he said, “we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the gentiles; they will mock him and spit upon him and flog him and kill him, and after three days he will rise again” (10:33-34).
We aren’t told how the disciples reacted to this declaration, but they seem not to have been terribly affected. The next pericope describes the sons of Zebedee, James and John, audaciously approaching Jesus to request a favor. “Appoint us,” they asked, “to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” Jesus’s initial response is essentially to ask them if they heard what he’d just said: “Are you able to drink the cup that I drink or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” Their affirmative response seems to have satisfied Jesus, but not to have persuaded him to grant their request; “to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to appoint, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared” (vv. 38-40).
Seasoned readers are likely to find all this rather unremarkable and hurry past the pericope’s conclusion. But this would be a mistake, because the conclusion is where things get interesting. When the other disciples got wind of what James and John had been up to, they became angry, ostensibly because they, too, desired power and privilege but had been beaten to the punch. Their grousing led Jesus to tell the twelve that both the brothers’ request and the others’ anger evidenced a misunderstanding of the shape of God’s reign. This misunderstanding is hardly unique to this pericope; we see it in Peter’s refusal to accept Jesus’s foretelling his execution (Mark 8:31-33; Matthew 16:21-23), in the unnamed disciple’s use of the sword to defend Jesus in Gethsemane (Matthew 26:51-54; Luke 22:49-51), and even in the disciples’ final query to the risen Jesus just before his ascension (Acts 1:6-8). The disciples assumed in each of these cases that the kingdom Jesus proclaimed was ultimately about power, when it was in fact about love made manifest through service.
This call to serve is a tough pill to swallow, not least of all because it runs contrary to the way we’ve been taught the world “works,” both for evil and for good. As Jesus put the matter, “You know that among the gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.” But that world, Jesus suggests, where might makes right, is passing away, giving way to the new world of God’s reign. Just so, he explains to the disciples, action in the guise of authoritarian power, even in the service of justice, is of the old age, rather than the new, where “whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all” (vv. 43-44). That this is the way of the God’s reign is confirmed by the life of its prophet and herald, who reminds us, “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many” (v. 45).
Jesus’s understanding of his mission echoes the fourth Servant Song from the book of Isaiah (52:13-53:12), which celebrates the one who brought good news (52:7-10) and suffered persecution (and worse) for his efforts. When we understand that Jesus is the exemplar of this way, we see that it is not about quiet, anguished passivity in the presence of unjust suffering, mere waiting for what poet Blumenthal calls “the abstract justice / of some perfecter world, when we sift // through the dark lexicon of possible deeds / in search of some wished-for Eden where righteousness / is a large Sequoia growing in a damp wood // surviving drought and lightning storms rising up / over the drone of its possible adversaries / as if there were no possible questioning / its heavenly arriving.” Rather, it is willingly laying aside the prerogative to use worldly power to get what we want, choosing instead to be, to the extent it is possible, in solidarity with those at the margins of our communities. It is using those things that have come to us as gifts to serve our neighbors through the corporal acts of mercy, and speaking truth to the powers responsible for their suffering. It is risking the safety and security our relative privilege has bought and paid for. And it is, finally, to recognize that the wages of goodness may be something we should be looking for ways to pay, rather than something we are owed.