By Ched Myers, For the Second Sunday in Lent (Mk 8:31-38), re-posted from Lent 2015
Note: An ongoing series of Ched’s brief comments on the Markan gospel readings from the Revised Common Lectionary.
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The midpoint of Mark’s narrative poses two questions, aimed both at the disciples in, and the readers of, the story:
“Do you not yet understand?” (Mk 8:21).
“Who do you say that I am?” (8:29a).
The latter provokes what I call the “confessional crisis” (8:30-33), which this Sunday’s reading inexplicably jumps into the middle of (we get the whole text on the 16th Sunday after Pentecost, Sept 13th). This is followed by Jesus’ second call to discipleship (8:34ff), deepening the journey begun in 1:16-20. Continue reading “Jesus’ “Second Call” to Discipleship”→
Note: I shared the comments below on the gospel reading for the First Sunday in Advent (Dec 3, 2023) as part of Creation Justice Ministries’ “Green Lectionary” podcast. You can hear my whole conversation with Derrick Weston & Debra Rienstra here.(above image: “All the stars in the sky will be dissolved and the heavens rolled up like a scroll,” Elena Markova, U.S., 2022; image found here)
Apocalyptic texts tend to make churchgoers nervous. In every lectionary cycle, however, the penultimate Sunday of Ordinary Time and first Sunday of Advent turn to what I call the “apocalyptic season” that bridges the end and beginning of the liturgical year. The gospel reading for First Advent always comes from the “synoptic apocalypse” (Mt 24, Mk 13, or Lk 21), before turning to the ministry of John the Baptist in Second Advent. This Year B we have the second half of Mark’s “Little Apocalypse” (13:24-37); the first part occurs at the end of Ordinary time. The lectionary’s brief apocalyptic focus functions to help us look at the “end of the world” as we prepare for it to be “born anew” in Advent and Christmastide.
Here are some brief thoughts (especially on the underlined phrases) on Sunday’s reading, with our ecological crisis in mind.
Mk 13:24-25: “But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
For us, apocalyptic images of the cosmos falling apart obviously correlate with the climate catastrophe that is upon us. Interestingly, the root of our term “disaster” comes from aster, or stars in Greek; we are indeed amidst a disaster. But too often we still apprehend ecological disaster as something happening to us, rather than engineered by us. In fact, the biblical idea of nature in revolt does not actually originate with apocalyptic literature, but with the Exodus liberation story. In that old wise tale, enslaved Hebrews are struggling for liberation against Pharaoh’s oppressive regime, an obvious mismatch. But the Creator has animated this movement, so Creation aligns against the empire in a series of escalating plagues that ultimately force the tyrant to relent (if you haven’t had a chance to look at my longer piece “Nature Against Empire: Exodus Plagues, Climate Crisis and Hard Heartedness,” go here). This profound framing lies in the background of Jesus’ vision here, and it’s not too difficult to see its relevance for our moment of imperial oppression of both people and Creation—in which we are each and all deeply implicated.
By Ched Myers, a brilliant Bush-era article on Luke’s Road to Emmaus story (this weekend’s Gospel text). It is more relevant than ever.
In the first-century Pax Romana, Christians had the difficult and demanding task of discerning how to cling to a radical ethos of life – symbolized preeminently by their stubborn belief in the Resurrection of Jesus – while living under the chilling shadow of an imperial culture of domination and death. Today, in the twenty-first-century Pax Americana, U.S. Christians are faced with the same challenge: to celebrate Easter faith in the teeth of empire and its discontents.
“The words empire and imperialism enjoy no easy hospitality in the minds and hearts of most contemporary Americans,” wrote the great historian William Appleman Williams a quarter century ago in his brilliant rereading of U.S. history. Yet today, because of the ascendancy of the New Right’s ideological project (whose intellectual architecture is typified by the Project for a New American Century), the words are increasingly used approvingly in regard to U.S. policy. We are indeed well down the road of imperial unilateralism, and are seeing clearly that this means a world held hostage to wars and rumors of war. The conquest and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq have had an enormous human and political cost. Meanwhile, the Unites States has military bases on every continent and some form of military presence in almost two-thirds of the 189 member states in the United Nations.
By Ched Myers, a commentary on last Sunday’s Gospel
Today’s gospel text for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost culminates Year C’s journey through Luke (next week’s “Reign of Christ Sunday” is a special feast day to close the liturgical year). It narrates the first half of the third gospel’s version of the “Synoptic Apocalypse” (Lk 21), which begins by portraying Jesus’ disciples, many of whom were up-country Galileans, as dazzled pilgrims encountering the grandeur of the “Holy” metropolis of Jerusalem for the first time (21:5).
Like rural folk visiting Washington DC for the first time, they were impressed (or perhaps just overwhelmed) by the imposing monuments and edifices of their nation, which conjured a visceral patriotism they assumed Jesus shared. We, too, inevitably experience moments of existential awe by our civilization, especially as powerfully represented by its built environment—whether civic, religious, industrial or military. We all dwell under the shadow cast by the self-congratulatory narrative of empire; it is so heroic and compelling that we become enamored with (or paralyzed by) the systems that rule over us, despite ourselves. “Wow!” they/we intone, “God bless America!”—then turn to Jesus to add plaintively, “right??”
By Ched Myers, on Luke 19:1-10, re-posted from October 2016
First, as always, let’s put this Sunday’s gospel reading in its broader narrative context. The story of Zacchaeus represents the culmination of one of Luke’s important subplots: Jesus’ challenge to rich men (Gk plousios) to “turn their lives (and assets) around.” As pointed out in previous posts, this narrative strand forms the backbone of Luke’s “Special Section” (Lk 11-19), a pattern worth reiterating here (with links to my comments earlier this year):
Note: The gospel reading for this Sunday, October 16, the 19th Sunday after Pentecost in the Revised Common Lectionary, is a poignant and amazing text focusing on the agency of women. We shared these reflections last month with pastors in the Greater Minneapolis Synod of the ELCA, and invite you to delight in this story of persistence that pertains both to our prayers and our politics.
The story is introduced as a parable. Jesus tended to tackle tough issue by speaking in this particular rhetorical form, as did the Hebrew prophets before him. Unfortunately, most of our congregations still spiritualize this kind of grassroots pedagogy, typically understanding them as—see if you’ve heard this one before—”earthly stories with heavenly meanings.” Thus tales about landless peasants and rich land-owners, or lords and slaves, or lepers and lawyers—or persistent women—are lifted out of their social and historical context and reshaped into theological allegories or moralistic fables that are bereft of any political or economic edge—or consequence. This functions to thoroughly domesticate the parable under our status quo, such that stories meant to challenge our preconceptions about the world are instead deployed by us to legitimate them. In this way, we effectively disarm one of the Bible’s most powerful rhetorical weapons, whose purpose is to rescue us from our domestication and dehumanization under that very status quo. But what if parables were actually “earthy stories with heavy meanings” as Ched’s teacher Bill Herzog argued in his wonderful book, now a quarter century old, about Jesus as a pedagogue of poor communities?
By Ched Myers (above, at the US/Mexico border), a commentary on Luke 12:13-21, reposted from the BCM July 2022 E-News
Note: The comments (and slides) below were crafted for the Los Angeles Catholic Worker community this month. The lectionary reading for the 8th Sunday in Pentecost (July 31st) features the unequivocal, doesn’t-mince-words Jesus offering a warning tale about persons and systems. Those of us who come from economic and social privilege should pay special attention to this passage. So we offer this piece (part of my new book project entitled Jesus against Plutocracy: Sabbath Economics in Luke’s Gospel)…
When we approach this text we need to acknowledge that economics is exceedingly difficult to talk about in most of our churches, more taboo than politics or sex. Jesuit theologian John Haughey summarized the dilemma. Yet no aspect of our individual and corporate lives is more determinative of our personal and political world than economics—and few subjects are more frequently addressed in our scriptures.
By Ched Myers, comments on John 21 for May 1, 2022
I’ve long been fascinated with today’s gospel reading. The story is roughly parallel to Luke 5:1-11, and notably Luke places his version at the beginning of his narrative of Jesus’ ministry (in place of Mark’s call of the fishermen), while John puts it at the end of his gospel. This tradition must have been strong in the early church, and seems to signal a restoration of divine abundance in place of the scarcity of the exploited fishery in defiance of official regulations.
John brackets this story (21:1,14) with assertions that this was a “revelation /manifestation” (phaneroō, 6 times in John, e.g. 3:21); this is the final revelation. John places it at the “Sea of Tiberias,” a name only he uses in the N.T. for the Sea of Galilee” (see 6:1), which seems to emphasize the imperial renaming of the lake. In C.E. 14, Caesar Augustus died and Tiberius eventually became Emperor. To cultivate the new emperor’s favor, in C.E. 19 Herod Antipas began building a new capital city, which he named Tiberias in a bald demonstration of fealty. Right on the Sea of Galilee, this city was part of a new wave of Roman economic colonization. Its primary function was to regulate the fishing industry around the Sea, the most prosperous segment of ancient Galilee’s economy, putting it firmly under the control of Roman and Herodian elites, who endeavored to control the industry for export markets.
By Ched Myers, a sermon to St. Michael’s Episcopal Church, Goleta Slough Watershed/Chumash Territory, CA, 5th Sunday in Epiphany, Feb 6, 2022
Luke 5:1-11 powerfully stitches together two gospel traditions: the miraculous catch of fish also found at the end of John (21:1-14), and the call of the fishermen which also occurs at the beginning of Mark (1:16-20). Let’s look at both themes, each so important to the vocation of followers of Christ.
Jesus’ encounter with working fishermen on the shores of Lake Galilee is typically romanticized in our churches: Oh, how quaint, fishermen! But this is a trivialization. No, this scene communicates defiance and delight, resistance and renewal—the same energy that fueled the painting of that new mural of the Goleta Slough here at the church, just completed by our friends Dimitri Kadiev, Rufo Noriega and Joshua Grace (right), which we are celebrating today.
By Ched Myers, for the 3rd Sunday of Epiphany, reposted from Jan 24, 2016 (Luke 4:14-21)
The setting of this famous story is significant. The obscure village of Nazareth has already been well established in Luke’s narrative as the home place of Jesus’ childhood, from Gabriel’s annunciation (1:26) to the Holy Family’s comings and goings (2:4; 39; 51), to the phrase in this week’s lection “where Jesus had been brought up…” (4:16a). Continue reading “The Nazareth Sermon as Jubilee Manifesto”→
By Ched Myers, For the Second Sunday in Lent (Mk 8:31-38), re-posted from Lent 2015
By Ched Myers, on Luke 19:1-10, re-posted from October 2016
Radical Discipleship 