The Destructiveness of All or Nothing

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Season 1, Episode 20: Matthew 11.16-19, 25-30. Lectionary A, Proper 9

Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it.

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The Destructiveness of All or Nothing
Herb Montgomery | July 7, 2023

To listen to this week’s eSight as a podcast episode click here.

“By taking the Bible as an un-nuanced whole they are setting themselves up to always be
destined to exhibit “deeds” that mix life-giving and death-dealing practices. That’s why our own journeys within Christianity are often so complicated. All-or-nothing approaches set us up to try to follow a Christianity that is both extraordinarily beautiful in some regards and a nightmare in others. We must learn to choose between those things that are Christian but death-dealing and those things that are Christian and life-giving.”

Our reading this week is from the gospel of Matthew:

“To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others:

‘We played the pipe for you,
and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge,
and you did not mourn.’

For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by her deeds.”

At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do. All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, 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.” (Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30)

There’s a lot in this week’s passage to unpack that could guide our justice work today. I love how our reading begins with John and Jesus being likened to pipers. John played a dirge; Jesus’ pipe called hearers to dance. Neither gets their desired response. John gets beheaded. Jesus gets crucified. But in the end, “Wisdom is proved right by her deeds.”

Two things resonate with me here. First is the feminine language for wisdom, in harmony with the Hebrew tradition. Second, she is proved right by the deeds to which she gives birth: wisdom produces deeds. It’s for us to discern from our own experience and the experiences of those not like ourselves whether what we think is wisdom has produced deeds that are life-giving or death dealing. It’s another way of saying, “by their fruits you will know them.”

Wisdom.

Is proved right.

By her deeds.

Are the actions being produced by so-called wisdom death-dealing? If they are, then we need to rethink what we have deemed to be wise.

I want to apply this to our faith tradition in a practical way for a moment. We can apply this principle to our expression of Christianity, our interpretations of the Bible, and the Bible itself, as well as the Jesus story within the Bible.

Let’s begin with the Bible. The Bible is not monolithic. The more one actually reads the Bible, the more one encounters passages in the scriptures that are life-giving and passages that are death-dealing. The Bible authors were trying make sense out of the world they were living in, within the bounds of their own time and space.

So this impacts how we relate to the Bible as a whole. I want to caution against an all-or-nothing kind of thinking. We can be honest about things in our sacred text that are not life-giving but destructive (its affirmation of slavery and texts of terror used against women are just two examples). And we can at the same time hold on to the things in the Bible that are beautifully good. We can hold on to the things that are life-giving, deeming them of enough positive value for us, yet not throwing our entire sacred text out because not everything in our sacred text has proven life-giving.

By their fruits we will know know them. Jesus practiced this method of interpreting his own sacred texts (cf. Luke 4:18-19 and Isaiah 61:1-2). We can take the good and let go of the bad by rightly discerning, or, to use Biblical language, “rightly dividing the word of truth” by testing passages by their fruit.

We can follow this same practice as we interpret specific passages as well. Sometimes it’s not the passage that is the problem but the way we have interpreted it. So we can hold our interpretations of texts to this same test: whether their fruit is life-giving or death-dealing, healing or destructive.

We can apply this to Christianity, holding its practices and doctrines to the test of “wisdom is proved right by her deeds.” And we can evaluate our interpretations of teachings we credit to the historical Jesus too. We can affirm the life-giving value of the Jesus story while also being honest about where the authors writing that story reflected the concerns and struggles of the early Jesus community out of which these stories evolved more than they reported direct transcripts from the historical Jesus. We can begin to embrace the humanity of Jesus himself, who “grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and people” (Luke 2:52).

For those who object (I hear these voices loudly in my own head at times), it’s helpful to remember that there is really nothing more to be said if someone who views the Bible, or Christianity, or the Jesus story as an all-or-nothing deal, a book in which the authors never made mistakes or brought in their or their community’s concerns. By taking the Bible as an un-nuanced whole they are setting themselves up to always be destined to exhibit “deeds” that mix life-giving and death-dealing practices. That’s why our own journeys within Christianity are often so complicated. All-or-nothing approaches set us up to try to follow a Christianity that is both extraordinarily beautiful in some regards and a nightmare in others. We must learn to choose between those things that are Christian but death-dealing and those things that are Christian and life-giving. An all-or-nothing approach puts people in a place where they have to grapple with whether they are even Christian at all when nuance would give them a way to embrace the good while rejecting the bad.

Ultimately, we must instead learn to practice knowing something by its fruit or the deeds it produces. Even our sacred text can be embraced as being inspired by the Divine while having been written by humans. This allows us and it to not always get it right: neither it nor we are infallible. We are simply reaching for and attempting to find ways of answering the big questions that are life-giving. Sometimes we get it right; sometimes we do not. And some questions can’t be answered yet. It’s up to us to hold everything with an open hand, asking questions from our own to-the-best-of-our-knowledge context today. We can let go of things that are death-dealing and hold on to those things that are life-giving. And when we discover that something we thought was life-giving actually isn’t, we can then let go of that, giving way to making room to embrace that which is. We can always be in search of the most life-giving way to follow the life-giving Jesus today, not being threatened by discovering we’ve been wrong about something, and always reaching for what is true.

I feel like that’s enough this week for most of us to chew on, but there are two final things I want to address in our reading.

The exclusivity at the end our reading sounds more like the gospel of John than the Jesus we typically encounter in the synoptics. It may reflect the claims of the early Jesus community and their efforts to communicate Jesus’s importance through the language of exceptionalism.

Today, we can do better. We don’t have to put others down for Jesus and his teachings to be intrinsically valuable. And we don’t have to make Jesus the only source of life-giving things to emphasize the value of his teachings.

Lastly, I want to address the yoke of Jesus being easy and his burden being light. One’s social location matters here. This statement was addressed to those who were worn out from being over-burdened in that society. To them, the yoke of Jesus was much easier than the yoke of the system they were trying survive in. Jesus’ system of resource-sharing, mutual aid, and taking responsibility for ensuring the care and well being of one another was way easier than every person or family being for themselves in a society where every moment they were teetering between survival and catastrophe, living each day one at a time. Again, this statement was given to those whom that system had worn out and overburdened. For them, Jesus’ yoke/burden was easy and light. But for those benefiting from the present system, change would be different. It was “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19.24) and embrace the changes Jesus’ teachings called them and us to.

Again, there’s a lot in this week’s gospel lectionary reading. What in our reading this week is resonating with you?

HeartGroup Application

1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your HeartGroup.

2. In what ways do you relate to the Bible or Christianity in nuanced ways, holding on to those things that are life-giving and rejecting those elements that are death-dealing. Discuss with your group.

3. What can you do this week, big or small, to continue setting in motion the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone?

Thanks for checking in with us, today.

I want to say a special thank you to all of our supporters out there. And if you would like to join them in supporting Renewed Heart Ministries’ work you can do so by going to renewedheartministries.com and clicking donate.

You can find Renewed Heart Ministries on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts. Also, if you enjoy listening to the Jesus for Everyone podcast, please like and subscribe to the JFE podcast through the podcast platform you use and consider taking some time to give us a review. This helps others find our podcast as well.

Also I want to share that we are partnering in a new weekly YouTube show called “Just Talking.” Each week, Todd Leonard and I will be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and societal justice. Our hope is that our talking will be just talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week you’ll be inspired to also do more than just talking.

If you teach from the lectionary each week, or if you’re just looking for some thoughts on the Jesus story from a more progressive perspective within the context of social justice, check it out, you might like it. You can find JustTalking each week on YouTube at youtube.com/@herbandtoddjusttalking. Please Like, Subscribe, hit the Notification button, and leave us a comment.

And if you’d like to reach us here at Renewed Heart Ministries through email, you can reach us at info@renewedheartministries.com.

My new book, Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels is now also available at renewedheartministries.com

Right where you are, keep living in love, choosing compassion, taking action, and working toward justice.

I love each of you dearly,

I’ll see you next week.

Now Available at Renewed Heart Ministries!

Herb’s new book Finding Jesus: A story of a fundamentalist preacher who unexpectedly discovered the social, political, and economic teachings of the Gospels, is available at renewedheartministries.com.

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