Woe to Who? by Marie Alford-Harkey
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Sermon for Proper 9A 2014
Marie Alford-Harkey, M.Div.
Trinity Episcopal Church, Hartford
July 6, 2014
I love this reading. I have an image of Jesus throwing up his hands in despair and saying, “I can’t win with you people.
“You’re like whiny children who can’t play nicely together. ‘We wanted to play funeral, but you wouldn’t cry. Then we wanted to play wedding, but you wouldn’t dance.’
“You said John had a demon because he didn’t eat and drink and you call me a drunk and a glutton because I do.
“Really,” I imagine Jesus saying, “there’s no winning with you!”
And then he says, “Ah, but just you wait, because ‘wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.’”
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom was often personified as a woman and was seen as God’s presence in the world. In Proverbs 8, Wisdom says that her voice goes out to all humanity proclaiming “Happy are they.” “Happy are those who keep my ways, happy is the one who listens to me, for whoever finds me finds life, but those who miss me hurt themselves.”
Returning to our gospel text, we find that the next five verses are not assigned in the lectionary. These missing verses are a series of woe to you statements, and it’s a shame not to mention them. As April says, “Who doesn’t love a good ‘woe to you?’” There are plenty of “woe to you’s” in the Bible.
“Woe to you scribes and Pharisees!” “Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you!” “Woe to you who are rich!” “Woe to you who are well-fed now.” “Woe to you who are complacent in Zion!” “Woe to you destroyer!” “Woe to you betrayer!” I’m sure we all have a few groups of people on whom we’d like to pronounce some “woe.”
For Jesus, it’s a few cities where he has recently performed miracles in hopes of revealing God’s ways and calling people to repentance. It seems that the miracles were welcome, but they didn’t lead the people of those cities to heed Jesus’ words and repent. And so Jesus can’t proclaim “happy are you who keep my ways.” Instead he pronounces “woe” on them.
And then Jesus gets all smug. Since those folks weren’t willing to change, he thanks God for revealing God’s ways not to the “wise and intelligent” but to infants. Infants in Jesus day weren’t just pure and innocent. In a society where only certain adult males mattered, infants were the ultimate symbol of vulnerability. They were disruptive.
So why would Jesus choose to reveal God’s ways only to those who were powerless? I don’t think it was a choice.
In the previous few chapters of Matthew’s gospel, we see that Jesus is doing his best to reveal God to everyone he encounters. He’s raised a dead girl to life, and he’s healed a hemorrhaging woman, two blind men, and someone who was mute. It’s not like he’s hiding. But it seems that his message is only reaching some people – those who are not in power.
Those are the people most likely to need to hear the last three verses of this passage. “Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
In both Jesus’ day and the time that this gospel was written, the Roman Empire was an oppressive force in the lives of Jews. The gospel was written in the very unstable time after the first Jewish rebellion, in which the Romans destroyed the Jewish Temple. Jews were suffering under Roman rule, reminded of their place by the very coins they had to use to pay for things, which were stamped “Judea conquered.” “Yoke” and “burden” were words commonly used to describe the Roman Empire’s oppression.
So in a very deliberate way, the author of Matthew’s gospel is using imperial language to fight the Roman Empire. Jesus invites those most burdened under imperial Roman rule to take on a different “yoke,” a different “burden,” if you will. Frank preached about a similar contradiction last week: “a form of slavery that brings freedom and health.”
In the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, in a passage parallel to this one, “My sovereignty is gentle,” rather than “my yoke is easy.” Those who are most powerless under the Roman Empire are being asked to voluntarily submit to another sovereign. But this one, we are promised, is a compassionate ruler whose reign benefits others, rather than only one group, one nation, or one individual.
Can you imagine such a thing? I confess, it’s difficult for me, raised as I was with those typically American ideals of independence and self-sufficiency. It’s easy for me to succumb to the notion that the ideal for our society is just what Frank warned about last week: an individualistic freedom unfettered and unrestricted, by any obligations we owe to others.
But on this Independence Day weekend, we are called to live under a compassionate sovereign, in the midst of the American Empire.
It isn’t easy, that’s for sure. The Empire is alive and well there is much woe to proclaim.
Woe to you, Supreme Court! You have gutted the Voting Rights Act, allowing states to make it harder for minorities to vote. You have upheld a ban on affirmative action that will make it harder for minorities to go to college and access other opportunities. Woe to you because in the name of religious freedom, you have stripped away contraceptive coverage in the Affordable Care Act, a provision that primarily benefitted low-income women. And woe to you because your perverted definition of “religious freedom” has already inspired a letter from so-called faith leaders urging the President to allow businesses to discriminate against LGBT people.
I imagine Jesus throwing up his hands, asking, “What am I going to do with you people? You say you value the dignity of every human being, but you ask for the right to discriminate against some, to deny healthcare to others, and to deny education and opportunities to still others.”
And woe to you, policy makers! Tens of thousands of children from Central America, unaccompanied by adults, are seeking refuge and your response, is to debate whether we should enact a policy to send them back to their home countries without even investigating the reasons why they have taken such a drastic step. The Episcopal Church’s Immigration Advocacy Newsletter describes how this crisis came about.
Since 2011, the number of unaccompanied immigrant children making the dangerous passage from Central America to the southern border of the United States has increased more than seven-fold, with arrivals expected to reach 90,000 children this year. The question at the heart of the debate, is why?
These children, many under the age of 12, are fleeing pervasive and inescapable violence in their home countries of Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. These countries are three of the most violent countries on the planet. Honduras has the highest murder rate in the world, with El Salvador and Guatemala rank fourth and fifth. Within these communities, children, and women are the most vulnerable and are therefore prime targets for violence and exploitation by the organized crime syndicate, gangs, and security forces.
The widely acknowledged tactic of targeting young children for gang recruitment and the lack of security for all civilians has triggered a regional humanitarian crisis years in the making, and has driven tens of thousands of children from their homes.
Woe to us, American people! Are we really so caught up in our false sense of scarcity that we are convinced that helping these children will somehow diminish our collective wealth and prosperity? Woe to us who cannot see how our own complicity in illegal drug trafficking helped cause this crisis!
This is probably the first and only time I will ever wish that we had big projection screens here at Trinity. Because if we did, I would project some pictures for you.
The caption of the first one says, “Some 900 unaccompanied children are being held at a converted warehouse in Nogales, Arizona.”
The photo is of a huge room that looks like a warehouse with a concrete floor, lit by fluorescent lights. A chain link fence creates what looks like a giant cage. Inside the fence, some children lie on what look like kindergarten sleep mats. They are covered with metallic emergency blankets. The kids sleep peacefully. Some other kids sit on long metal benches, angled diagonally inside the giant cage. Around the perimeter of the fence are porta potties, with their vents reaching up and out of the ceiling.
The caption of the next one says, “Female detainees sleep in a holding cell.” (Imagine calling young children “detainees.”)
In this photo two young girls are sleeping on those same kindergarten mats, on their stomachs, heads pillowed in their arms. They are in the corner of a chain link fence cage, with their heads touching the fence. One girl’s left side is against the side of the fence, the other girl’s right side is against a porta potty. They are both wearing blue gym shorts and white tee shirts, like a uniform.
The caption of the last photo says, “Detainees sleep in a holding cell at a US Customs and Border Protection processing facility in Brownsville, Texas.”
In this photo, the children are in a cinder block cell with a concrete floor. There are a couple of hard benches, formed by extending the cinder block out from the wall and covering it with what looks like a counter top. Here there are no mats. Kids lie directly on the floor, piled together like puppies, under blankets with the Red Cross logo on them. There is a half wall in the corner of the cell, on which sits a roll of toilet paper.
Can it be that Jesus is revealing God’s ways to us through these vulnerable children seeking refuge among us? Is it possible that they will disrupt the American Empire enough to move beyond polemical positions and bring us face to face with our own humanity?
I live in that hope. And Jesus did too. He believed that in the midst of an oppressive Empire, human beings could choose to serve a different kind of ruler. He believed that Wisdom would eventually be proven by her deeds. May that be so for us. Amen.