Authorial Intent



Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I think the world is made of stories. I mean that literally.

The things that are most real to us, most fundamental to human existence and experience, are not electrons, photons, and quarks—which all collapse into theoretical strings—but consciousness, meaning, purpose, value, goodness, truth, and beauty. That’s how we encounter and interpret reality. That’s what gets us out of bed in the morning. More basic than the how is the why. And the why is always narrative. Why is a story.

We build ourselves, build our souls, on stories: stories about families and nations, gods and monsters, humor and horror. We learn through stories, teach through stories, cope through stories, grow through stories. We rejoice, we celebrate, through stories. And eventually we start to see that all these stories intersect, they begin to blur at the edges, until all of our stories become the one Story, the story of us all; in which we each participate, yet none alone could write, for we ourselves are characters in the drama.

One Story implies one Author, an eternal Source beyond the limits of finite space and time; someone who sees the whole and brings it to its intended fruition. Meaning, my friends, is either transcendent, or else it doesn’t exist. The alternative to narrative is nihilism. And even that’s a story, just not a very good one.

We call the life of Christ “the greatest story ever told.” But that doesn’t mean that the Gospels stand as paragons of literature. Some of them have rather unsophisticated Greek. There are times when the Evangelists are frustratingly spartan in the details they choose to share, while at other times they go off on inexplicable asides. If nothing else, the jumble offers verisimilitude.

It’s not the greatest story ever told because the writers had the greatest skill. Quite the contrary. It’s the greatest story ever told because of who Christ is. Christians understand Him as the Word and Son of God, by which we mean not some second god, some rival power in the heavens, but God Himself come down, incarnate, in this Man: Emmanuel, God-With-Us.

The Word of God, the Λόγος, is the self-revelation of God. He speaks the world into being, through the Spirit, who is His Breath, His Life, and the Word, who is His Mind, His Idea. Here in Jesus, the Author has entered His work. The Storyteller is part of the story right along with the rest of us, as one of us. He is God’s idea of humanity, indeed of all Creation. And so He is the union of God with all that He has made: the Dreamer as part of the dream, the Writer as part of the writing, the Word who contains and creates all worlds.

God has spoken this one Word Jesus, and in this Word is all God is, giving Himself to us; to love us, heal us, teach us; to raise us from darkness to light; to go forth uncomplaining when we sentence Him to death; and to whisper our forgiveness as we pierce Him on the Cross. Jesus is the Story and the Author, Creator and Creation, God and Man. He gathers all things unto Himself. Behold, He makes all things new.

My favorite theologian* put it thusly:

I find the figure of Christ ever more uncanny: the notion that in the first century, in Hellenistic Judea and Galilee, there was this fierce prophet who spoke incessantly on behalf of the poor and the marginalized, the sick and the indebted and the imprisoned, and who condemned not only their oppressors but simply those who ignored their plight; and who was murdered by the combined political and religious authorities of his day; and yet this murdered slave, and agitator, and radical turns out to be God. I find that impossible not to think about.

Our Gospel reading this morning takes us to the Sermon on the Plain. This is the Lukan iteration of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, whereby Jesus lays out His basic teachings in a very public forum, and so begins to turn the wheel which will eventually cause His death. Whereas the Sermon on the Mount took place along the Galilee, amongst a people largely overlooked by the wealthy and the powerful, the Sermon on the Plain occurs in a more urbane and southerly clime, along the Mediterranean, amongst a mixed multitude.

“Blessed are you who are poor,” preaches Jesus, “for yours is the kingdom of God.” Oh, my. Trouble already. Zealots expect the kingdom of God to flash out of heaven like lightning. God, they pray, shall send His Messiah, His Anointed One, to make Judea great again, kicking out the Romans, shaking off the shackles of foreign servitude. Is Jesus riling up the poor and the oppressed? Is He looking to start a rebellion, as others had tried before? It didn’t go so well for them, nor for those they’d involved.

He continues: “Blessed are the hungry, for you will be filled. Blessed are those who weep, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, for so they treated the prophets.” Now honestly, what nonsense is this? The poor, the hungry, the sorrowful, the oppressed—how could they be happy? How could they be blessed? What god would show his favor by grinding his votaries under his feet?

Now Jesus flips it around: “Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your reward. Woe to you who are full, for you will soon be hungry. Woe to you who laugh, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is how they treated false prophets.” Here Jesus turns His beatitudes backwards, with a bit of a populist bent. The weirdness of His woes shows teeth. Who is He to undermine the wealthy, fat, and famous?

In the Greek of our Gospel, woe is merely a sound, an exclamation. “But, oh, you who are rich!” It is presumably a translation of one of two prophetic Hebrew words, the first of which means, “Lo! Hey! Listen up!” and the latter being something more like, “Uh-oh.” Just what does Jesus mean by this? Doesn’t He know that it’s better to be happy than be sad? Doesn’t He see the benefits of wealth, how money gives us freedom, power, choice? Hasn’t Jesus gotten all this backward—or have we?

He’s telling a different story from the one we tell ourselves. And it’s uncomfortable, isn’t it? Uncanny. Last week, at the Super Bowl, we all celebrated wealthy, famous people playing games at our expense. Woe to them? Don’t we all want to be like them … ? Not if that is where they’ve put their trust: in wealth, in fame, in popularity and power. For those things fade and fail us. They eat away at our souls. No matter what’s in your garage, or your bank account, or your CV, time sweeps it off the board like chaff before the wind.

So many of our stories speak of heroes: great warriors, kings, titans of industry, mighty men. Yet one and all they die. That’s the whole point of the Iliad, or of Beowulf: we all get old, we all get weak, we all lose the worldly things we thought gave value to our lives. Woe, to you! Listen up! Beware! That is not the story we should tell. Power and riches have no value in themselves. They are not the purpose of the narrative, not the meaning of your life. Trust instead in the things we cannot lose: in goodness, in truth, in love.

This is the blessing of the poor: that God sees them, knows them, loves them, and will never let them go. They are freed from the fetters here that bind the rich to death—not in that poverty ought to be romanticized, nor hunger held up as ideal. But real joy, real love, real life transcends the finite constraints which we encounter here below. Live not a life of hoarding, in a mindset of scarcity, but boldly give away the gifts that God bestows for all. On your deathbed, your gold will not save you.

Fame is fleeting, strength withers away, yet Christ has come to show us what a human life should be: committed to truth, unafraid of death, bold and forgiving, generous to a fault, laying down His life for those He loves. That’s our story! That’s what’s real. That’s who we all are and ought to be. We are to be Jesus for this world. Because the story of the poor is our story, our neighbor’s need is our need, and that’s where we find God.

Blessed are you when you know this is true. It just remains to live like we believe it.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.






*David Bentley Hart, obviously.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RDGStout/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsqiJiPAwfNS-nVhYeXkfOA
Twitter: https://x.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064841583987
Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
Donation: https://secure.myvanco.com/L-Z9EG/home

Nidaros Lutheran
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100074108479275
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026


Comments

Post a Comment