2024-12-28 A Meditation on Substratum Resentful

“23 Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, 2 “The scribes and the Pharisees sit on Moses’ seat, 3 so do and observe whatever they tell you, but not the works they do. For they preach, but do not practice. 4 They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. 5 They do all their deeds to be seen by others. For they make their phylacteries broad and their fringes long, 6 and they love the place of honor at feasts and the best seats in the synagogues 7 and greetings in the marketplaces and being called rabbi by others. 8 But you are not to be called rabbi, for you have one teacher, and you are all brothers. 9 And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. 10 Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. 11 The greatest among you shall be your servant. 12 Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. 13 “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you shut the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. For you neither enter yourselves nor allow those who would enter to go in. 15 Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you travel across sea and land to make a single proselyte, and when he becomes a proselyte, you make him twice as much a child of hell as yourselves.” (Matt 23:1-15 ESV)

Resentful, the dichotomy is portrayed where one party spends their time resentful, and another spends their time hastening, signing up, conscripting their lives, getting on with things. Yet all need love, and the flustered gripes, never spoken, from those whose worldview included Pastor’s study, the confessional, some of what some would call spoilt upbringing, meets up against others no less besmirched with pain, with injury, with hardships, with calamity.

Or is this all some imaginative fantasy of what is “out there”? True, we all of us need some Encounter to dispel the ghosts, the imagined slights, the suspicions around motives. But also it can become a crime to be filled with Joy. The reluctance, the fact of having compromised (“if you’re upset, then just why not leave? … the church… the fellowship… the reluctant membership”) meets the fact of Today’s urgent Momentum: we are rightly to claim the titles of Agents Provocateur, or Gospel-Messengers diaconate-wise, some perch—needn’t be the top—in the totem of Carriers of the Good News.

All this, then, a eulogy for the persecuted church, whose posture, whose perch, whose poise is built upon a notion that You Will Be Rejected. You Will Be Hated. You Will Be Preempted. For, our pride and joy is at loggerheads with some downward tug that is still waiting… endlessly waiting… for us to become the uptight or resentful, the Touched and Spooked crime scenes called Discipled. Discipleship the plain appeal, if we be allowed rightly to hear it, to love on those who are more retentive or flustered, rather than on that “set out there” whose presence, after all, we’ve decided we no longer want to have in the church after all.

All this sounds self-aggrandizing, excuses being made, lame blame games. But the fact of Justice and Judgment does mean that it isn’t for lack of love, just for lack of time: that the cookie crumbles more towards so-and-so than towards thus-and-such. We are imputed, inducted to be, ordained as Capable, servants, deacons, responsible Churched-Folk. We after all don’t “need anything”, right? We are all backs to the wall together fighting the mongrel hordes, right? We are appealing to the outcast and the lame, to the tres cool and the unpopular, right? Or is a word in season instead a word that embraces awkwardly the mish-mash of Church Life in Community? Are we to confess our own judgments made, that these nice folks in the pews already have the gospel, whereas some opposed and persecuted souls “out there” are in dire need of a lift?