June 2, 2024, Do Not Love Me Like a Rock, Mark 3:1-6 – guest speaker, Carroll Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ June 2, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to the sermon plus a little beyond it, click the link above. The text is below.

1. When did Jesus get angry?

What is the first event that pops into your mind when you try to imagine Jesus being angry? Most people think immediately of Jesus making the whip and clearing the Temple. This was certainly a confrontational event, dramatic enough that three of the four gospels reported it (Mark 11, Luke 19, and John 2). Interestingly, none of the three accounts specifically say that Jesus was angry when he did it. And think about it: why should he have been? He had been to the Temple dozens of times before he cleared it. He knew what he would find there. It was nothing he wasn’t used to. Why should he be angry about it on that last visit he made? No, I think he did it to make a point, not only teaching his disciples, but to make a point with the religious leaders of the day.

In fact, there is only one time in the gospels that specifically says that Jesus was angry, right here in Mark 3, which we just read. Both Matthew and Luke report the event of Jesus healing the man with the withered hand, but only Mark says explicitly that Jesus was angry. So only one time in the gospels does it say Jesus was angry about something. And the Greek word that is used here is ὄργη, which is usually translated as “wrath” as in “The day of the Lord’s wrath”. The day that Jesus healed the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath is the nearest example the NT gives to the day of the Lord’s wrath. Since that is the only such occurrence in the NT, it means that we ought to pay special attention to it.

2. Why did Jesus get angry?

According to Mark what really upset Jesus as he looked around at the religious leaders was their hardness of heart. He had a lot of encounters with the religious leaders, Pharisees, Sadducees, scribes, over the course of his preaching ministry. Sometimes they tried to trick him with clever questions, sometimes they tried to kill him, sometimes they spread lies about him, but only here did they make him mad. He had always expected them to oppose him. So hostility to him was no surprise. But now they were gathered around silently, watching, waiting to see what he would do with this poor guy in the synagogue on the Sabbath. He knew they were like wolves that had surrounded their prey and were ready to pounce. So he asked them a question, trying to get them to think about what they were doing: “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to kill?” It should have been a pretty straight-forward question, but they just sat there glaring at him, silent, watching, waiting for him to violate the law, so they could be witnesses and testify against him at his trial. It was a serious trap. The penalty for violating the Sabbath was death.

It was this, their stony silence that made Jesus furious. And it was a stony silence, a hardness of heart. The Greek word for “hardness” could be translated as “insensible” or “dull” or “closed up”. In the OT, there are various ways various prophets talked about hardness of heart. One of the most familiar, perhaps, is from the prophet Ezekiel 36:26, “I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.” The prophet saw God’s people as having hearts of stone. They were unfeeling, unsensible. And here comes Jesus four centuries after Ezekiel and sees the same thing. The teachers of Israel still have hearts of stone. Confronted with a specific person who was suffering, it was not a theoretical abstract point of law. It was a specific person vs their interpretation of the law.

3. What were they hardened to?

As it is described throughout the OT, from the beginning when Moses was leading them out of slavery in Egypt, the people of Israel were hardened against hearing and understanding God’s word. In Psalm 95:8 it says, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your fathers put me to the test and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. For forty years I loathed that generation and said, ‘they are a people who go astray in their heart and they have not known my ways.’ Therefore I swore in my wrath, ‘they shall not enter my rest.’ ” Even in the OT it was hardness of heart that made God really furious. Exodus 17:7 reports the event at Meribah. The offense of the people at that time was that they quarreled with God. They put words in his mouth instead of listening to what he said.

Here in Mark 3, the religious leaders were doing the same thing, but with the commandments. They thought they loved the law but they quarreled with God’s commands. In Mark 3, they were quarreling with the commandment to keep the Sabbath day holy. They insisted that the whole purpose of the command was to be obeyed literally and in detail. So much detail! Do not work on the Sabbath, and they had a comprehensive list of what was and was not considered work. And doing a miracle, helping this guy with the withered hand – that was doing work. But they had missed the whole point of the law. Deuteronomy 5 says, “Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the Lord your God commanded you…on it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter or your male servant or your female servant, or your ox or your donkey or any of your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.” The point of the Sabbath was not that privileged people should have a day devoted to the Lord. They could do that any time they chose and let their servants carry the load. The point was that their servants should be left alone as well. Don’t do any work and let your maids and hired hands and the guys who work at the grocery stores and the poor who get by on scraps can have a day to worship God.

The teachers of Jesus’ day listened to the law all right, but they were hardened against hearing the purpose of the law, that it was about mercy and not sacrifice. And they were hardened to all of the other laws in the same way. Jesus had just told them bluntly, before the withered man had shown up, “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.” When he said the Sabbath was made for man, he meant that all of the law was made for man. Man was not made for the Sabbath, and in fact man was not made for the law period. The purpose of the law was exactly to love people actively, not to harm people passively. To heal a withered hand on the Sabbath was to obey the true purpose of the law. To make the man wait another day for healing was to harden the heart against God’ purpose. It was to quarrel with God about what he meant by his commandment.

4. How did they harden their hearts?

Paul said it most plainly in Romans13:10, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor. Therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” The whole point of the commandments is to get us to love our neighbors as ourselves. It was never the purpose of the law to threaten us into unthinking obedience. That is exactly what hardness of heart does. It focuses on the law, the rules, as if they were the whole point of life, as if love of neighbor was only to be allowed in the fringes of our lives after we had scrupulously keept all the details of the law. The religious leaders in Israel had convinced themselves that obeying the Law was more important that loving their neighbor, that loving their neighbor was a commandment but only a minor one to be observed after the other important commandment had been done. They had convinced themselves that God wanted them to obey the Law more than he wanted them to have compassion and mercy. Compassion and mercy could wait until the rest of the law allowed it.

How did they miss the whole purpose of the law they loved so much? One way they did it was by building up a whole forest of little commandments around each law. It was no longer keeping the Sabbath day holy. It was don’t carry water on the Sabbath, don’t cook any meals on the Sabbath, don’t walk more than a few hundred feet on the Sabbath, etc. up until in modern times it included don’t turn off the lights in the synagogue on the Sabbath. There were so many little laws to attend to that they lost sight what it was all for.

It is easy for us to do the same. We have also built up a long list of “Christian rules” that we can also lose sight of compassion and mercy and think only in terms of sinners. I grew up in such a church where there was a rule for everything. When was it OK to watch a football game on Sunday? Could you work in your garden on Sunday? What about listening to rock and roll? Wearing blue jeans to a worship service? Which words were OK to say when you were mad? How close exactly could you get to “colored people”.

We can hedge our lives with so many rules that we simply cannot see the people any more. We invent little “principles” that we quote as if they were biblical. We call hardness of heart “tough love” so we can pretend cruelty is actually a kind of love. We can talk about the “self-made man” as if such a thing existed, as if it would be a virtue if it did. We talk about the “deserving poor” so that we can pretend we can turn away from the destitute or homeless, as if God saw them as undeserving and let us off the hook of loving them. We talk about “racial purity” as if we white people had any purity at all in our history. The Pharisees at least had enough respect for God that the justified their hardness of heart from the Bible.

We also justify ourselves, like the Pharisees did, by appealing to our traditions. Not all traditions are bad. We Episcopalians love our tradition. But when tradition becomes a means of hurting people, then we are in the realm of hardness of heart. We quote the Bible, “wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord” as if that were a commandment right from the mountaintop, as if that meant God had appointed the husbands to be the enforcers of a rule rather than the servants of their wives. Male domination is a long long tradition, one that the Episcopal church has only escaped in the 1970’s and reluctantly at that. But I think there is no place in which hardness of heart is more angering to God than when a church hardens its heart against LGBTQ people. Because they violate our traditional morality? Because Paul seemed to speak against homosexuality, as if Paul were a new Moses? Instead of treating LGBTQ people as neighbors, we harden our hearts against them. How furious must Jesus be? Shouldn’t we know better than the Pharisees did? As the prophet said, we are storing up wrath for ourselves.

The cure is two-fold. Pray, as the prayer book teaches us to do in the Great Litany, for God to keep us from hardness of heart. Learn to put people before rules. Quit seeing people as sinners. See them as God’s chosen children. But there is a positive angle to it too. Pray that God would make us the opposite of hard hearted. In Ephesians 4:32 he exhorts us, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.” In Colossians 3:12 and in I Peter 3:8 we get similar exhortations. We are suppose to be people who are the opposite of hardhearted. God is not in favor of “law and order”. He is in favor of “compassion and order”. Don’t be tough on crime. God wasn’t tough on your crimes. Be soft on crime, on sin, tender hearted, forgiving. Go beyond the golden rule. Don’t do to others as you want them to do to you. Do unto others as God already did unto you, giving his own son as a servant to you for your salvation.