Inclusivity and Taking Care of the Vulnerable
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, September 28, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our subject this week is inclusivity and taking care of the vulnerable. Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark,
“Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward.
“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them if a large millstone were hung around their neck and they were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into Gehenna, where the fire never goes out. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than to have two feet and be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into Gehenna, where
“‘the worms that eat them do not die,
and the fire is not quenched.’
Everyone will be salted with fire. Salt is good, but if it loses its saltiness, how can you make it salty again? Have salt among yourselves, and be at peace with each other.” (Mark 9:38-50)
There are quite a few things to consider in this week’s lectionary reading from the gospels. The first exchange we encounter is the dialogue between Jesus and his disciples over a person doing something in Jesus’ name but not as part of the disciples’ group. Jesus’ response is a generous, inclusive “big tent.”. It’s not limited, restrictive, or exclusive. It doesn’t say only certain ones are part of Jesus’ movement. Jesus does not view this person as a rival in competition with his immediate circle of disciples. He is not threatened by their actions, but rather is encouraged by it. He tells his disciples, “Whoever is not against us is for us.”
The spirit of Jesus’ work is love, inclusivity, justice and liberation. He doesn’t add additional criteria. He doesn’t need everyone to be the same in every detail. He exhibits a comfort with diversity as long as it aligns with the core values of a safe, compassionate, just world for everyone. Notice that his example is as simple as offering a cup of water to the thirsty: it’s about compassion and taking responsibility for others having what they need to thrive. We don’t need to overcomplicate this. Today, there are many people who, due to their negative experiences with Christianity, are uncomfortable with any association with “Jesus” yet are deeply involved in working toward justice. We can come alongside them and aid their work because, though we may be different in some particulars, in the end we are all working for the same kind of world: a world for all of us.
The next thing in our reading is Jesus’ words about how we treat “these little ones.” A central theme of Jesus’ synoptic teachings and the tradition of the Hebrew prophets is what Liberation Theologians call a preferential option for the most vulnerable. The “little ones” in Jesus’ community were the most vulnerable among them. Just as simple as making sure those who are thirsty have water, this principle is about how we relate to those most vulnerable to injustice, oppression, and abuse in our communities. Are we creating a society that safeguards the most vulnerable?
This dialogue about the little ones includes a reference to Gehenna. Some translations use the word “hell.” This is a signifiant issue for me. Some Christians have taken these statements and created a post mortem realm of eternally burning torment and torture with no foundation in the teachings of the Jewish Jesus. In the final section of my book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels, I share how “Gehenna” evolved in the Hebrew scriptures.
In the Hebrew prophetic justice tradition, Gehenna became a reference to destruction and subjugation by Gentile empires in this life, not life after death. And this destruction came because they failed to take care of the vulnerable in their communities and they violated and exploited them.
Here are just a few examples from the Hebrew prophets, warnings not of post mortem events, but of events that would transpire for the nation in this life if they did not correct their course:
“Edom’s streams will be turned into pitch,
her dust into burning sulfur;
her land will become blazing pitch!
It will not be quenched night or day;
its smoke will rise forever.
From generation to generation it will lie desolate;
no one will ever pass through it again.“ (Isaiah 34:9-10)
“But if you do not obey me to keep the Sabbath day holy by not carrying any load as you come through the gates of Jerusalem on the Sabbath day, then I will kindle an unquenchable fire in the gates of Jerusalem that will consume her fortresses.” (Jeremiah 17:27)
“The voice of the LORD will shatter Assyria;
with his rod he will strike them down.
Every stroke the LORD lays on them
with his punishing club
will be to the music of timbrels and harps,
as he fights them in battle with the blows of his arm.
His Topheth [the Valley of Hinnom or Gehenna] has long been prepared;
it has been made ready for the king.
Its fire pit has been made deep and wide,
with an abundance of fire and wood;
the breath of the LORD,
like a stream of burning sulfur,
sets it ablaze.“ (Isaiah 30:31-33)
‘And they will go out and look on the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; the worms that eat them will not die, the fire that burns them will not be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind.’” (Isaiah 66:22-24)
Both the “unquenchable fire” and the “worm that doesn’t die” symbolized destruction one would not be able to stop. Neither Isaiah nor the gospels use this language to describe something taking place after death. Jesus, standing in the lineage of the prophets defending the poor and like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and others before him, was calling for justice. Jesus used Jewish language and metaphors to warn of impending doom. Each of these prophets denounced, implicated, and indicted a system that benefited the powerful while exploiting the vulnerable.
We must also be honest about the ableist language in this text. There is a spectrum with being whole on one end and Gehenna on the other, somewhere along the spectrum is missing limbs, being “crippled,” and missing an eye. The language paints these conditions as being less than being whole, yet not as bad as Gehenna. I reject this use of disability. As Jesus followers today, we can tell the Jesus story in better ways.
Lastly, Jesus teaches about salt losing its saltiness. In that region, salt was harvested by collecting all the white rocks and placing them in a salt bag. This bag was used to stir food being prepared. The salt would dissolve through the cloth but any white rocks inadvertently included in the bag that were not salt would remain. Eventually the bag would lose its ability to season food because all the salt was gone: the salt would lose its saltiness.
Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk writes,
“Much of what passes for the propagation of the gospel actually equates to acts of oppression. When the saving of souls is of ultimate value, it can become easy for other values to be pushed aside. This evangelistic impulse turns every mystical experience into an altar call and every person into a soul to be saved. And historically Christians have shown an ability to care for people’s souls while dismissing their bodies, their land or their dignity.” (Maki Ashe Van Steenwyk, The UnKingdom of God.)
In this passage, Jesus has been speaking about how we relate to the most vulnerable among us. Are we taking care of them? When we must be intentional about our refusal to become so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good. We must care about saving bodies and our material world around us an not exclusively be about saving souls. We must be concerned with the injustices and suffering of the here and now rather than solely focused on a post mortem future. Otherwise, we have lost our salt. We are called to follow Jesus’ example in Mark’s gospel, to affect and transform our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone, especially our most vulnerable.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. How do you see our passage about taking care of the most vulnerable in our communities applying to recent events in Springfield, Ohio? 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 29: Mark 9.38-50. Lectionary B, Proper 21
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 24: Inclusivity and Taking Care of the Vulnerable
Mark 9:38-50
“Love, inclusivity, justice, and liberation don’t impose extra conditions, nor do they require everyone to be alike in every detail. Jesus embodies an openness to diversity. In this passage, He speaks about our responsibility toward the most vulnerable among us—are we truly caring for them? We must be intentional in our rejection of being so ‘heavenly minded’ that we are indifferent to the needs of our world. Our mission is not just to save souls but to care for bodies and our material world. We must address the injustices and suffering of the present, rather than focusing solely on the afterlife. Otherwise, we lose our essence, our ‘salt.’ In Mark’s gospel, Jesus calls us to transform the world into a safe, compassionate, and just home for everyone, especially the most vulnerable.”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?
Free Sign Up Here
Servants of the Most Vulnerable
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, September 23, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark:
They left that place and passed through Galilee. Jesus did not want anyone to know where they were, because he was teaching his disciples. He said to them, “The Son of Man is going to be delivered into the hands of men. They will kill him, and after three days he will rise.” But they did not understand what he meant and were afraid to ask him about it.
They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.
Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all.” He took a little child whom he placed among them. Taking the child in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.(Mark 9:30-37)
There’s quite a bit for us to unpack this week.
First, our reading affirms the resurrection in a way that the Markan community for whom this version of the Jesus story was written would have expected. In this narrative, Jesus knew he was going to be resurrected all along. It was only the disciples that didn’t understand what was going to happen.
But what grabs my attention most in our reading this week is the argument by the disciples over who was the greatest disciple of Jesus’ and how Jesus responded.
Jesus turns our hierarchical ways of structuring our communities upside down. He is a genuine anarchist in the truest definition of the term: one opposed to hierarchal ways of structuring society. What our passage also reveals is that the Markan community must have needed to address this issue. I can easily imagine debates in the early Jesus movement after Jesus’ death over who was the greatest of his disciples, especially as some of them competed for positions of power and influence.
Mark’s gospel doesn’t completely eliminate hierarchical structure here, but instead defines leadership in the community as about serving community needs, not simply holding a position of power over others. We find this echoed in other parts of the Christian scriptures:
“To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ’s sufferings who also will share in the glory to be revealed: Be shepherds of God’s flock that is under your care, watching over them—not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.” (1 Peter 5:1-3, emphasis added.)
I do want to offer a word of caution here. We must hold serving others in tension with other values. Without that balance, it can be death dealing. It can lead those being subjugated and/or exploited to passively accept their exploitation rather than correcting their exploiters.
Consider how women have been subjugated by patriarchal Christianity . Rather than addressing patriarchy and moving toward a more egalitarian community, the “greatest is a servant and the first shall be last” rhetoric has often been misused. Rather than correcting those seeking positions of status over others (like the disciples in the original story), it has been used to encourage women to accept their subjugation to and exploitation by men in the church as “Christlike.” Mary Daly writes:
“The qualities that Christianity idealizes, especially for women, are also those of a victim: sacrificial love, passive acceptance of suffering, humility, meekness, etc. Since these are the qualities idealized in Jesus “who died for our sins,” his functioning as a model reinforces the scapegoat syndrome for women.” (Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, p. 77)
This has not only been historically true for women but Christian slave masters also used this rhetoric against their slaves. We have examples of this even in the Christian scriptures themselves. It didn’t take long before Jesus’ words intended to address and correct those seeking status over others were twisted and used against those being suppressed. One example can be found in the epistle to the Ephesians:
“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.” (Ephesians 6:5)
There are other examples in the letter to the Ephesians too: not only slaves being taught to accept their subjugation and exploitation, but also women and children.
“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands.” (Ephesians 5:22)
“Children, obey your parents.” (Ephesians 6:1)
When we compare these passages to our reading this week, I find a stark contrast. Rather than telling children to be obedient to the adults in their lives, Jesus uses his lesson on service to teach adults about how they should treat children, the most vulnerable among us. Rather than calling for slaves to obey or women to submit, Jesus is instead calling anyone who wants to serve the Jesus community to intentionally practice a preferential option for the most vulnerable among the community. In that society (and most societies) that group is children.
This makes me ask the question: are we misusing the teachings of Jesus today to further deepen others’ subjugation? Or are we practicing a preferential option for the most vulnerable in our communities, seeking to serve rather than possessing status, and calling for and working toward changes that eliminate subjugation altogether?
It makes a big difference whether Jesus’ words in our reading this week are used as a corrective for those seeking standing and status, and whether we define leadership in the Jesus community as about serving the needs of the community especially those most vulnerable to injustice. Are we taking Jesus’ words about service and encouraging those who are vulnerable to passively accept subjugation in our culture? Are we using Jesus’ teachings to ensure that leadership is life-giving, or are we flipping Jesus’ script and using his teachings in ways that dehumanize and devalue some people’s intrinsic worth.
Some may consider this to be a subtle difference, but it makes a huge difference. One way to tell the difference is to ask yourself who is being addressed: those in power and being corrected for how they lord their authority over others, or those being lorded over and encouraged to passively accept their experience?
In the very next chapter of Mark, Jesus addresses this issue again when he says:
“You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be slave of all.”(Mark 10:42-44, emphasis added.)
How we shape our faith communities matters. And these words offer wisdom in our justice work in our faith communities and in the wider society. When we vote for leaders, are we voting for leaders who have at heart the well being of even the most vulnerable among us? Do they care about the actual needs of the community they are seeking to serve or are they primarily concerned about themselves and what they want from whatever leadership role or office they are seeking?
As I consider the political season we are presently in here in the Unites States, I hear wisdom calling to each of us from these words in Mark’s gospel. Consider the record of those seeking office from our local communities all the way to the Office of the President. Do they really care about others or do they only want your vote? Ask yourself, how do those asking for your support treat those who most vulnerable to injustice, subjugation, and exploitation in our society? Character matters! Is their character such that seeks to serve themself or to genuinely serve the people? “Anyone who wants to be first, must be servant of all.”
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. How have you witnessed the servant model used in both healthy and unhealthy ways in your own experience? 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 28: Mark 9.30-37. Lectionary B, Proper 20
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 23:Servants of the Most Vulnerable
Mark 9:30-37
“Some may consider this to be a subtle difference, but it makes a huge difference. One way to tell the difference is to ask yourself who is being addressed: those in power and being corrected for how they lord their authority over others, or those being lorded over and encouraged to passively accept their experience? How we shape our faith communities matters. And these words offer wisdom in our justice work in our faith communities and in the wider society. When we vote for leaders, are we voting for leaders who have at heart the well being of even the most vulnerable among us? Do they care about the actual needs of the community they are seeking to serve or are they primarily concerned about themselves and what they want from whatever leadership role or office they are seeking? As I consider the political season we are presently in here in the Unites States, I hear wisdom calling to each of us from these words in Mark’s gospel. Consider the record of those seeking office from our local communities all the way to the Office of the President. Do they really care about others or do they only want your vote? Ask yourself, how do those asking for your support treat those who most vulnerable to injustice, subjugation, and exploitation in our society? Character matters! Is their character such that seeks to serve themself or to genuinely serve the people? “Anyone who wants to be first, must be servant of all.”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/servants-of-the-most-vulnerable
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?
Free Sign Up Here
Refusing to Passively Endure Injustice
Thank You!
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, September 13, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark:
Jesus and his disciples went on to the villages around Caesarea Philippi. On the way he asked them, “Who do people say I am?”
They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”
“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”
Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.”
Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him.
He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.
But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Or what can anyone give in exchange for their soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of them when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels.” (Mark 8:27-38)
I love it when the gospel lectionary readings are from one of the synoptic gospels. This passage in Mark gives us a lot to consider because this passage has been used for harm. As Jesus followers today, we can choose to let go of harmful interpretations to make room for more life-giving ones.
First, the claim that Jesus was the Messiah has long been used to harm our Jewish friends, family and neighbors. Before Christians used the title of Messiah against the Jewish community, who the Messiah was was an intra-tradition argument. What I mean is that Jewish voices within the Jewish community initially made the claim of Messiahship was in dialogue and sometimes debate with other Jewish voices. The earliest Jewish Jesus followers, even before the narrative events of his death and resurrection, had recognized something in Jesus’ teachings that gave them hope in Jewish renewal and restoration. That hope was originally a liberation hope within a larger oppressed community that was anything but monolithic. For them, Jesus’ teachings pointed to the same liberation they hoped for.
The community for whom the gospel of Mark was written recognized Jesus as Messiah and our reading this week was intended to affirm this recognition. There is something political for the early church deeper in this reading too. Naming Peter as the one who declares Jesus’ messiahship in this gospel narrative also affirms the community’s recognition of Peter’s authority among the other apostles in the early Jesus movement. Jesus as Messiah was not just an question for the Markan community. All of the communities after Jesus hotly debated which voices were to be recognized as authoritative. So this week’s passage is actually much more about Peter than it is about Jesus: it is only secondarily about Jesus’ messiahship, a tenet that this community already accepted. We should read this passage primarily as establishing Peter’s authority as one who recognized and affirmed the community’s belief in Jesus’ messiahship.
Whatever we make of the claim of Jesus’ messiahship today, we must be intentional about holding our interpretation in a life-giving way for all. Messiahship originally meant liberation and restoration. Today we must similarly hold our interpretation in a way that does no harm. Within Christianity today, we must be especially careful in regard to the history of harm we are responsible for by the careless ways we have used the term “Messiah” when we speak of Jesus.
Let’s now talk about Jesus’ call to take up the cross. Many Christians have held the cross in a way that promotes the myth of redemptive suffering. Too often, bearing one’s cross refers to the kind of suffering that every person suffers whether they are standing up for justice or not. Let’s be honest: life includes a lot of suffering. It’s how we interpret and respond to that suffering that matters. But the cross was only about a specific kind of suffering, not all suffering in general. The cross was a political consequence and had a political context. The cross was suffering perpetrated by those in positions of power and privilege on people who were calling for change within an unjust system. Latin American liberation theologian Jon Sobrino warns us of romanticizing the cross and removing it from its original political context, and thus romanticizing suffering that has nothing to do with working for justice.
“There has been. a tendency to isolate the cross from the historical course that led Jesus to it by virtue of his conflicts with those who held political religious power. In this way the cross has been turned into nothing more than a paradigm of the suffering to which all human beings are subject insofar as they are limited beings. This has given rise to a mystique of suffering rather than to a mystique of following Jesus, whose historical career led to the historical cross.” (Jon Sobrino, quoted in Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker’s For God So Loved the World?, p. 16)
Suffering doesn’t give life. Mujerista theologians (Hispanic woman’s liberation theologians) remind us that life is found in our struggle against suffering (see Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria. Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century, p. 21).
Jesus didn’t choose to suffer. He chose to live a life in opposition to injustice and oppression. Jesus didn’t choose to die. He chose to refuse to let go of his hold on the fight for justice when threatened with a Roman cross if he continued. For Jesus, the cross was a Roman-imposed response to Jesus’ refusal to change his course. The cross today is not suffering in general but the threat by those who benefit from an unjust status quo that we will suffer if we speak out. I don’t interpret Jesus in this week’s reading as promoting suffering. Rather he is calling for those being threatened for speaking out against injustice to keep speaking out, to not be silent, to keep up the fight and join him in the fight even in the face of real threats.
Joanne Carlson Brown and Rebecca Parker, feminist theologians, rightly interpret the cross when they write:
“To be a Christian means keeping faith with those who have heard and lived God’s call for justice, radical love, and liberation; who have challenged unjust systems both political and ecclesiastical; and who in that struggle have refused to be victims and have refused to cower under the threat of violence, suffering, and death. Fullness of life is attained in moments of decision for such faithfulness and integrity. When the threat of death is refused and the choice is made for justice, radical love, and liberation, the power of death is overthrown. Resurrection is radical courage. Resurrection means that death is overcome in those precise instances when human beings choose life, refusing the threat of death. Jesus climbed out of the grave in the Garden of Gethsemane when he refused to abandon his commitment to the truth even though his enemies threatened him with death. On Good Friday, the Resurrected One was Crucified.” (God So Loved the World?, Brown and Parker, p. 22)
Too often Christians in power have used “bearing one’s cross” to teach that to follow Jesus means to passively and patiently endure whatever abuse, injustice, or oppression one is experiencing with the hope that in the afterlife your suffering will be rewarded. Nothing could be further from the way Jesus describes taking up one’s cross in our reading this week. The cross is not passively enduring injustice. The cross is the threat abusers and oppressors make against us for our refusal to passively endure injustice. The cross is the threat intended to make us passive.
When Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross, he’s telling them to keep refusing to be passive, even if you’re threatened with a cross for doing so. And even in doing so, we must remember that the cross is not intrinsic to standing up for what is right. A cross only enters our story if our abuser or oppressor chooses to respond to our calls for change with threats rather than change. Jesus’ call is a call to courageously refuse to let go of your hope for justice, for change, for liberation, and freedom to thrive. Don’t passively endure suffering. Don’t give in when those who have privileges to lose seek to persuade us to patiently “endure pain, humiliation, and violation of our sacred rights to self-determination, wholeness, and freedom” rather than speaking out (God So Loved the World?, Brown and Parker, p. 2)
How are you speaking out for change right now? How are you working for a brighter today and tomorrow? In whatever ways we are working for justice, even if those benefitting from injustice threaten us, the Jesus of our passage this week calls us to keep at it.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. Share an experience of where you refused to be silent about injustice? 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 19: Mark 8.27-38. Lectionary B, Proper 19
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 22: Refusing to Passively Endure Injustice
Mark 8:27-38
“Too often Christians in power have used “bearing one’s cross” to teach that to follow Jesus means to passively and patiently endure whatever abuse, injustice, or oppression one is experiencing with the hope that in the afterlife your suffering will be rewarded. Nothing could be further from the way Jesus describes taking up one’s cross in our reading this week. The cross is not passively enduring injustice. The cross is the threat abusers and oppressors make against us for our refusal to passively endure injustice. The cross is the threat intended to make us passive. When Jesus tells his followers to take up their cross, he’s telling them to keep refusing to be passive, even if you’re threatened with a cross for doing so. Jesus’ call is a call to courageously refuse to let go of your hope for justice, for change, for liberation, and freedom to thrive. Don’t passively endure suffering. Don’t give in when those who have privileges to lose seek to persuade us to patiently ‘endure pain, humiliation, and violation of our sacred rights to self-determination, wholeness, and freedom’ rather than speaking out”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/refusing-to-passively-endure-injustice
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
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Jesus, a Greek Woman and a Magical Cure
Thank You!
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, September 7, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark:
Jesus left that place and went to the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it; yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an impure spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter.
“First let the children eat all they want,” he told her, “for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
“Lord,” she replied, “even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
Then he told her, “For such a reply, you may go; the demon has left your daughter.”
She went home and found her child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis. There some people brought to him a man who was deaf and could hardly talk, and they begged Jesus to place his hand on him.
After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man’s ears. Then he spit and touched the man’s tongue. He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, “Ephphatha!” (which means “Be opened!”). At this, the man’s ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly.
Jesus commanded them not to tell anyone. But the more he did so, the more they kept talking about it. People were overwhelmed with amazement. “He has done everything well,” they said. “He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” (Mark 7:24-36)
Our reading this week contains two stories that inspire a conversation about what it means to make our world a safer, more compassionate, and just home for everyone.
The first story is of a Greek woman who approaches Jesus on behalf of her daughter who is possessed. There’s a lot to unpack in this story.
First, possession in the gospel of Mark is a consistent metaphor for the very real, concrete possession the people of this region experienced from the Roman Empire. In Mark 6, the demon is named “Legion.” This was what the largest unit of the Roman Empire was called. A Legion was often placed in an indigenous people’s territory to keep them from revolting. The Jewish people were not the only ones subjugated by the Roman Empire and their territory taken as Roman possession. The Greeks were subjugated by the Romans, too.
The second thing to notice is the intersection of two different social locations Jesus is standing in simultaneously. As a Jew, Jesus belongs to a people once subjugated and oppressed by the Greeks during the Maccabean era, when the Jewish people were violently oppressed by the Greek emperor Antiochus Epiphanies. This gives us context for why a subjugated, indigenous people (the Jews in this case) would consider their oppressors and subjugators (in this case the Greeks) to be dogs. Many Jewish people also at this time referred to Romans as dogs. Social location here matters and helps us understand context.
The other social location Jesus is standing in is being a man in a patriarchal world that subjugated and oppressed women. Jesus is oppressed and empowered simultaneously. You would be standing on two different streets simultaneously if you stood where those two streets intersected. This is called intersectionality: Jesus is standing in two intersecting social locations in his exchange with this woman. As a Jew, he is in the social location of those who were once oppressed by those he is interacting with. As a man he is in the social location of patriarchal privilege and power in relation to the woman he is interacting with He is simultaneously standing in the privilege of oppressor (as a man) and disadvantage (as a Jew).
Intersectionality is such a rich lens through which to relate to our world as we work for justice. Jesus being Jewish helps us understand why he would call a Greek a dog, while his being a male calling a woman a dog is unacceptable and derogatory. When this woman calls Jesus on it, she ultimately enlarges and expands his experience and understanding. We never see Jesus relating like this to Jewish women. In fact, in a patriarchal culture, Jesus’ relation to Jewish women is remarkably egalitarian. In this story, Jesus learns that Greek woman live in intersecting social locations too. He comes to see that this person before him is more than just a Greek person whose people once persecuted his people. He sees her as a human being, a parent who simply wants something better for her child than Roman oppression. Everyone who is a parent can identify with wanting something better than you’ve experienced for your children.
We all live in intersecting social locations within our own system too. We are all oppressor and oppressed simultaneously depending on which aspect of our identities is privileged or disadvantaged in our society. What this story models is how, in the areas of our life where we are privileged, we can all learn to compassionately listen to those who in those areas of our life are marginalized or excluded. And, in the areas of our identities that others consider less than, this story calls us to push back and hold accountable those who consider us less than, no matter who they are. Even if they are Jesus.
In the second story in this week’s passage, we have the story of a deaf and mute man. This story is omitted in the gospels of Matthew and Luke. Some Jesus scholars think it may be because the story sounds too magical for later Jesus communities. Jesus puts his fingers in this man’s ears, spits, touches the mans tongue, and speaks an Aramaic word. It’s a strange healing story, no doubt, and it’s only here in Mark. I understand why later versions of the Jesus story simply leave it out.
But this story in our reading provides us with the opportunity to talk about ableism and considering or treating people with disabilities as inferior.
In Jesus’ society, people with certain disabilities were put in a marginalized and disenfranchised economic, social, and political position. And this week’s story doesn’t challenge that economic system that exploited the vulnerable and excluded the deaf and mute. It also doesn’t center those with disabilities and their right to self-determination and to change a system that practiced discrimination in favor of able-bodied people. Instead, this story makes a person more able-bodied so they could survive and be included in a discriminatory, competitive system. Rather than making the system more fair, this healing simply places the person in an equal place of opportunity to compete. Mark will critique and call for change of the system elsewhere in this version of the Jesus story(Mark 10:17-23). But this is not one of those times. Equal opportunity in a system that creates winners and losers is not the same as creating a system where everyone wins together and there are no more losers.
As Jesus followers seeking ways to make our world a more compassionate and just home for everyone, we can do better than what this story offers. Let me explain.
People who live with disabilities are not “less than.” And we also live in a system that practices discrimination against disabled people in favor of able-bodied people. It’s an ableist system. Ableism characterizes people by their disabilities and classifies disabled people as people who are inferior to non-disabled people. Where medicine and technology can grant people with disabilities with greater ability, people should be able to choose what to use, within their right of self-determination. We also have a long way to go make our world, communities, and larger society more accessible physically, socially, economically, and politically for those in our human family who live with disabilities.
As Jesus followers, we can also practice greater care and intention than those who have told these stories before us. In the Jesus stories, we encounter a Jesus who often (except for in the case of this one Greek woman) practiced a preferential option for people with disabilities. And that is the part of the story we can hold on to. Where we need to be careful is where disabilities in the gospels are used as metaphors for sin, evil, or wickedness. An example of what I’m talking about is where gospel stories use blindness as a pejorative metaphor against people who reject Jesus (Matthew 15:14; Luke 6:39). This denigrates those people who live every day of their lives with actual blindness.
For Christians acculturated to accept the ableism in the gospels, leaving ableism behind will take effort. But the effort is worth it. I used to use the phrase “blind-spots” to describe when I or folks I interacted with had a limited outlook on an intrinsically harmful practice. Today I want to respect those in my life who live with limited vision. Rather than using phrases that harm them or imply villainy, I now just say what I mean: instead of saying a person has a “blind spot” I simply say their understanding and experience is limited and needs to expand. The story about Jesus and his interaction with the Greek woman is a great example.
Today we need more than magical cures that enable people to do better in our economy’s game of Monopoly. We need a world where there are no more winners and losers and we all win together. Others don’t need to lose for us to win. We can all thrive, genuinely, at the same time. And all of this is part of what it means to be be striving in our spheres of influence to make our world we share a safe, compassionate and just home for everyone. It’s a beautifully challenging work. And one I’m thankful to be engaged in.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. What are some examples of where you experience the intersectionality of living simultaneously in different social locations in your own life? Share and 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 25: Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23. Lectionary B, Proper 16
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 21: Jesus, a Greek Woman and a Magical Cure
Mark 7:24-36
“Intersectionality is such a rich lens through which to relate to this Jesus story as we consider how it may inform our justice work today. We each occupy intersecting social positions within our own society’s systems, where we can simultaneously be both oppressor and oppressed. Our privilege or disadvantage intersects depending on different aspects of our identities in relation to society. This story illustrates how, in the areas where we hold privilege, we can learn to listen with compassion to those who are marginalized or excluded in those same areas. At the same time, in aspects of our identity where we are deemed “less than” by others, the story encourages us to stand up and hold accountable those who diminish us—no matter who they are, even if it’s Jesus.”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/jesus-a-greek-woman-and-a-magical-cure
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?
Free Sign Up Here
Morality, Culture Wars, and Consent
Thank You!
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, August 31, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our reading this week is from the gospel of Mark.
The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. When they come from the marketplace they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.)
So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, “Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?”
He replied, “Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites; as it is written:
“ ‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are merely human rules.’
You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions.” . . .
Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, “Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them . . . For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come—sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and defile a person.” (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23)
The first thing that jumps out to me (because We spent so much time in August in the gospel of John. The first thing that jumps out to me in Mark is who it defines as opposing the Jesus movement. In John, it’s Jesus versus Jews in general. It’s Christianity versus Judaism. We have discussed at length how harmful this Christian anti-semitic trope has been and continues to be.
In Mark, however, the narrative is Jesus versus Pharisees. The debate is within Jewish society, an argument between Jewish voices arguing with other Jewish voices.
Nonetheless, in the same way that John overgeneralizes and lumps all Jews together, Mark overgeneralizes and lumps all Pharisees together. This has led many Christians to use the term “Pharisee” as a pejorative term. That is anti-semitic, and Christians today need to stop using the term Pharisee as a negative. The Pharisees were a religio-political party whose members held a spectrum of beliefs. Pharisees in the House of Shammai were at one end of the spectrum and were the most restrictive. Pharisees in the House of Hillel were on the other end of the spectrum and defined Torah observance as love, and specifically love of neighbor. After the time of Jesus, the school of Hillel became the dominant group in the Pharisees and later evolved into Rabbinic Judaism. It interpreted the entire Torah through the lens of how one treated their neighbor. Jesus’ teachings (with the exception of debt cancellation and divorce) were much the same as the Hillelian Pharisees in this regard. The debate we encounter in Mark 7 is with Pharisees on the most outwardly restrictive end of the spectrum.
The Pharisees were just one of many religio-political groups at the time of Jesus who competed for social authority and positions of influence and power. Isenberg gives us a window into understanding the social context of our reading this week:
“The Pharisees, as other groups, engaged in interpretation of the written Torah…[but] distinguished themselves from other groups by a peculiar claim for the authority of their traditions and, by extension, for the authority of the Pharisaic tradents. They established their right to interpret authoritatively by placing themselves in a chain of tradition going back to the original revelation of Torah at Mt. Sinai and then by putting the contents of their interpretive activities into that very revelation. This they did by telling a myth which reports that both Written and Oral Law were revealed on Mt. Sinai…. Such claims to authority put them implicitly in competition with the other groups that claimed and had legislative authority, the priests and their supporters, the Sadducees…. It is reasonable to assume that they clashed on the matter of the Oral Law, and there is reasonable evidence from Josephus and the rabbinic literature to support the assumption. Certainly the matter was worth disputing since the outcome of the argument established who had control over the redemptive media in Jewish Palestine (Isenberg, quoted in Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus, pp. 220-221)
Another thing that may be difficult for us to wrap our heads around today is that the practice of washing in our reading was before the discovery of germ theory. Perhaps people in that culture noticed a link between people who got sick and those who didn’t wash their hands before eating. The sect of Pharisees we are reading about this week had ritualized the practice of washing one’s hands and attached moral value and worth to it. It was not simply a health practice. It was a practice within a set of behaviors that defined whether the person washing their hands was themself was morally pure or unclean.
In our reading this week, Jesus contrasts the inconsistency of being fastidiousness about hand washing while having utter disregard for the moral demand of caring for one’s parents in their old age:
And he continued, “You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and mother,’ and, ‘Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.’ But you say that if anyone declares that what might have been used to help their father or mother is Corban (that is, devoted to God)—then you no longer let them do anything for their father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down. And you do many things like that.” (Mark 7:9-13)
Next in our reading, we encounter Jesus discussing the practice with his disciples:
After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. “Are you so dull?” he asked. “Don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.” (In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean.) (Mark 7:17-19)
Here, Jesus moves the focus from outward washing to what is transpiring on the inside of a person. “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them . . . For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come.”
Then Mark lists behaviors that actually defined morality in the community for whom this gospel was written. Morality, remember, is socially defined. Morality begins with what a culture defines as right and wrong, as good or bad behavior. Individuals then decide what they define as moral behavior in agreement with or in contrast to the morality of their culture. Some moral positions have been proven to bring harm intrinsically, and are present within all cultures. Other moral issues have been deemed harmful by specific cultures and are only prohibited in those cultures. We can learn a lot by listening to the morality of other cultures as they can reveal things our own culture has yet to learn. Listening to others has the power to reveal to us areas where, as in our reading this week, we may be disregarding something that is intrinsically harmful while prohibiting things that are intrinsically life-giving. How many times have we grown up to discover that something we thought was wrong wasn’t harmful at all while those things we used to deem as perfectly fine in reality were hurting or damaging us? It’s helpful for those of us living in religious or theistic cultures to remember that something is not wrong simply because our God said so. Something can be deemed wrong because it is intrinsically harmful and some things have been mislabeled by all cultures.
What first hints to me that Mark’s list was shaped by its culture is the inclusion of “adultery.” At the time this was written, adultery was not egalitarian. The concern was never for a woman whose husband may have cheated on her, as our culture often defines adultery today. Adultery was defined only as when a man engaged in sexual intercourse with a woman who was betrothed or already married to another man. Adultery did not refer to sex with a single woman. It only concerned itself with the property rights of the man to whom the woman belonged (see The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, vol. 4). This is because the culture making this list was deeply patriarchal. Today, many of us have experienced how deeply destructive a culture and practice of patriarchy intrinsically is. Adultery can still be part of our morality discussion today, but we should define it in more egalitarian ways to honor the rights of all partners, to all people in marital or committed relationships deeply harmed by the un-consented, violating fracture of those commitments.
Culturally, it’s still easy for us today to say amen to most items of this list. Some of them are universal. Things like theft, murder, greed, malice, deceit, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly (recklessness) are things that many of us could still agree violate the golden rule of treating others the way we would like to be treated and doing no harm to other people. Where we get into culture wars today is in how to define sexual immorality and lewdness. I find it ironic that those who are quick to accusing others of sexual immorality are most often guilty themselves of the immorality of arrogance. And however we land on what we define to be sexually immoral or lewd, our own sexual ethic should at least include consent and the practice of doing no harm. Too often what certain sectors of Christianity define as sexually immoral is between two consenting adults and hurts no one. We must ground discussion on what is and isn’t sexually immoral on a definition of morality that looks at the intrinsic results of the behaviors in question, not just imposed dogma. Is something intrinsically death-dealing or is it life-giving and mislabelled? We too often turn our gaze and pretend not to notice things that are intrinsically death-dealing while we scrutinize and forbid behaviors that intrinsically do no harm.
So, while holding in our hands the golden rule, let’s begin a discussion on consent. Genuine consent has five foundational qualities. It must be ongoing. Anyone can change their mind about what they are doing at any time, and so consent can be retracted at any time. Consent must be freely given. Someone’s yes must be offered without them feeling pressured, forced, or afraid to say no. Consent must be specific. Saying yes to one act doesn’t mean you’ve said yes to others. Consent must be enthusiastic. This means actually wanting to do something, and not feeling like you should or that you have to do something. And lastly consent is informed. Consent is violated by lying or deceiving someone. (For more info see https://www.nsvrc.org/)
Beginning any discussion on sexual immorality at the much deeper level discussion of consent, sets us up for a discussion that many raised in Christian purity culture have never had. Discussions on consent allow us to uncover a more holistic way of understanding and defining sexual morality.
Consent is an egalitarian discussion. It doesn’t privilege any gender above another, or penalize one while ignoring others. Beginning the discussion of what is sexually moral and what is sexually immoral with discussion of consent includes us all.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. If you were to rewrite the internal list here at the end of our reading this week for us today, what would your internal list include? Share and 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 25: Mark 7.1-8, 14-15, 21-23. Lectionary B, Proper 16
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 20: Morality, Culture Wars, and Consent
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
“Where we get into culture wars today is in how to define sexual immorality. I find it ironic that those who are quick to accusing others of sexual immorality are most often guilty themselves of the immorality of arrogance on this list. And however we land on what we define to be sexually immoral or lewd, our own sexual ethic should at least include consent and the practice of doing no harm. Too often what certain sectors of Christianity define as sexually immoral is between two consenting adults and hurts no one. We must ground discussion on what is and isn’t sexually immoral on a definition of morality that looks at the intrinsic results of the behaviors in question, not just imposed dogma. Is something intrinsically death-dealing or is it life-giving and mislabelled? We too often turn our gaze and pretend not to notice things that are intrinsically death-dealing while we scrutinize and forbid behaviors that intrinsically do no harm. So, while holding in our hands the golden rule, let’s begin a discussion on consent. Consent is an egalitarian discussion. It doesn’t privilege any gender above another, or penalize one while ignoring others. Beginning the discussion of what is sexually moral and what is sexually immoral with discussion of consent includes us all.”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/morality-culture-wars-and-consent
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
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Free Sign Up Here
Right Now Matters
Thank You!
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, August 24, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
This is our last reading from the lectionary this month from chapter 6 of John:
“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” [Jesus] said this while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?”
Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? Then what if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you—they are full of the Spirit and life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled them.”
From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.
“You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.” (John 6:56-69)
This is our last lectionary week in John for a while. Next week, the lectionary returns to the gospel of Mark. We have spent the last four weeks not simply in the gospel of John, but specifically in one chapter, John 6. This final passage sums up the four messages of that chapter.
The first message is a prescription to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink his blood. The second denigrates physically feeding the multitude or meeting people’s material, concrete needs: “Your ancestors ate the manna and died.” The third exalts the Spirit over our material existence. And the fourth emphasizes that our flesh, body, and material existence in this world “counts for nothing.”
We have spent the last four weeks contrasting this way of characterizing Jesus and his ministry with the way Mark, Matthew and Luke characterize them. The Jewish Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke would not have used the language of eating his flesh and drinking his or any blood. Consider the following cultural prohibitions against ingesting blood:
“This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, wherever you live: ‘You must not eat any fat or any blood.’” (Leviticus 3:17)
“And wherever you live, you must not eat the blood of any bird or animal. Anyone who eats blood must be cut off from their people.” (Leviticus 7:26)
“I will set my face against any Israelite or any foreigner residing among them who eats blood, and I will cut them off from the people. For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life. Therefore I say to the Israelites, ‘None of you may eat blood, nor may any foreigner residing among you eat blood.’ . . . You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off.” (Leviticus 17:10-14)
Drinking or eating blood, even drinking blood “that makes atonement,” was a foreign idea.
It’s also problematic to devalue the work of meeting people’s material needs like Moses did by feeding a multitude of people with manna during the exodus, Jesus did with loaves and fish, or as many today do through soup kitchens today. This is the tension that exists between the present and future. Some people say our lives don’t matter because we are all going to end up dead. Others, even those who are non-religious, say that ultimately dying doesn’t negate how meaningful present realities are. These things may or may not have meaning in the future, but they all still have meaning right now. In the present, we are alive, and what what we are experiencing means much to each one of us. It betrays a deep lack of compassion to say someone’s experience of hunger right now doesn’t matter because it may or may not matter in the future.
The choices we make today also affect what other people are experiencing right now, and can spill over into generations to come after we are gone. Over the last hundred years alone, so many who are no longer living made discoveries and choices that benefit all of us today. To say that our present realities don’t matter because we will one day die (or that one day billions of years from now the sun is going to burn out) is a very stunted way of looking at our existence. What we are encountering in John is simply a Christianized version of this way of looking at our material existence.
I grew up in churches that would put on charity programs, not in the liberation spirit of the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke but more in the spirit of the Jesus we find in John 6. This kind of charity work was only temporary and only for the purpose of harvesting leads for upcoming evangelistic events. Saving souls was much more important than saving bodies, and that logic was rooted in the thinking we find in John 6. In the synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), we don’t see a Jesus who is only concerned with people’s eternal well-being but one who was also deeply troubled with concern for people’s present, material, concrete well being. The multitudes who ate the loaves and fish still died! But this didn’t stop Jesus from feeling compassion for their hunger and desiring to feed them. The Jesus of the synoptics is different from the Jesus of John. John’s Jesus is all about getting people connected with the Spirit so they can have eternal life, while the synoptic Jesus is deeply concerned with liberating people, especially marginalized people, from lives in which they lacked things essential for well-being like food and warmth.
Stop and contemplate Luke’s Jesus for a moment. Luke’s author could have characterized Jesus’ ministry in so many ways but chose a passage from Isaiah and the Hebrew prophetic justice tradition:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
The poor, the imprisoned, the disabled, the oppressed—these were who Luke’s gospel was for. The Jesus of Luke doesn’t just offer them eternal life as an opiate that enables them to patiently endure their present experience. He doesn’t tell them that their present experience in the big scheme of things “counted for nothing.” What Luke’s gospel offered these people was proclamation of the “year of the Lord’s favor,” the year of jubilee when all debts were forgiven and wealth was redistributed, emancipation was given to those enslaved, and all those who had been oppressed were liberated.
I understand that the Johannine community was estimating the worth of the eternal life they believed could be found in Jesus. But we don’t need to say our material experience counts for nothing in order to do that. Dualistically dividing our existence into categories of things of the spirit and things of the flesh and then saying the fleshy stuff counts for nothing has produced untold harm throughout Christian history. Our bodies matter. Our present moments matter. Today we can do better.
Today, in the spirit of the Jesus of Mark, Matthew, and Luke, we can say that what we are experiencing right now does matter. Here and now matters. The kind of society we are choosing to form right now matters for all who are alive right now. We are not just passing through! We cannot allow ourselves to become so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good, or to put it in John’s language, so eternity minded that we are not presently any good.
Christianity that is only concerned with the future and not concerned with the present is not only insipid, but also become vulnerable to being coopted by those who use Christianity to harm people today while passing out tickets for eternal life.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. Why does right now matter to you? Share and 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 25: John 6.56-69. Lectionary B, Proper 16
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 19: Right Now Matters
John 6:56-69
“These things may or may not have meaning in the future, but they all still have meaning right now. In the present, we are alive, and what we are experiencing right now means much to each of us. It betrays a deep lack of compassion to say someone’s experience of hunger, for example, right now doesn’t matter because it may or may not matter in the future. What we are encountering in John is simply a Christianized version of this way of looking at our material existence. The future will come. But right now, we are alive. We live in this moment. Our material existence does matter. Injustice, oppression, violence, and suffering matter. Love for those who are experiencing these realities demands that they matter.”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/right-now-matters
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?
Free Sign Up Here
The Evolution of the Eucharist
Thank You!
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, August 17, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our reading this week is from the gospel of John:
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” (John 6:51-58)
Our reading this week is the Johannine’s community’s nod to the Eucharist. In John’s gospel, Jesus’ last supper (John 13) is quite unique from Mark’s, Matthew’s and Luke’s descriptions.
There is no blessing of a cup. There is no breaking of bread. There is only a story of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. This foot washing does not appear any of the other gospels’ accounts of the last supper, and only in our reading this week in John is Jesus’ body and blood something to be consumed.
I appreciate the work of Jesus scholars who point out the evolution that the Eucharist went through in the early Jesus movement. One example is John Dominic Crossan’s book, The Historical Jesus The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. In this book, Crossan puts forward five possible evolutionary stages the Eucharist went through in the early Jesus moment.
In the Greco-Roman culture of Jesus’ time, “bread and wine” was short-hand, a colloquial term for a formal meal. And when formal meals were eaten as a group, they conveyed meaning and a social structure, showing the group boundaries for who was part of the group and who wasn’t, and defining identity, mutuality, and relationships within the group.
The second stage is the way Jesus practiced table fellowship. The Jesus of the synoptics practiced open, radical, social egalitarianism in his table fellowship. This practice by Jesus is where the early Jesus movement derived its approach to shared meals. We see an early form of these shared meals by the Jesus community in the Didache where, at this stage of the meal’s evolution, it was a communal meal shared in thankfulness. Take note of the words and meaning associated with the bread and the cup:
“First concerning the Cup. “We give thanks to thee, our Father, for the Holy Vine of David thy child, which thou didst make known to us through Jesus thy child; to thee be glory for ever.” And concerning the broken Bread: “We give thee thanks, our Father, for the life and knowledge which thou didst make known to us through Jesus thy child. To thee be glory for ever.” (Didache 9:2–3)
In this stage, the cup represented the fruit of the vine, the community that Jesus had grafted followers into and all the blessing this community brought into their lives. The bread was a symbol of the knowledge and life they had gained through Jesus’ teachings and life.
This was a communal meal where those who had food shared with those who didn’t and everyone had enough. This resonates with what we find being practiced in the book of Acts where:
“All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.” (Acts 2:44-46)
This ultimately created the kind of community where “there were no needy persons among them” (Acts 4:34).
At these stages, this “bread and wine” shared meal was still about mutuality and resource-sharing, using community to alleviate need and materially save the marginalized and disenfranchised. As a church instructional document, the Didache does not define the bread and wine as symbols of Jesus’ death or dying but as what Jesus followers gain by practicing Jesus’ teachings together as a community.
In 1 Corinthians 10-11, we encounter the earliest reference in our canon to the Eucharist meal. Unlike the Didache, Paul’s letter mentions another way of practicing this meal among the early Jesus communities. This practice, for better or worse, was more ritualized, and it appropriated the Greco-Roman phrase “bread and wine” to represent Jesus’ body and blood:
“The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (1 Corinthians 11:23-26)
This is the description most Christians are familiar with today, but we should acknowledge how different this is from how the Didache speaks of the bread and wine. The early Jesus community was far from monolithic and what we see here is two ways of understanding and eating the Eucharist meal that coexisted alongside each other. Even in Paul’s letter, we encounter the strong sense of egalitarianism that should be practiced in this way of participating in the sacred supper. Paul describes how the Corinthians were failing this standard:
“So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk.” (1 Corinthians 11:20-21)
Note that Paul teaches not that they return to a practice of resource-sharing as we encounter in Acts, but rather “you should all eat together, and anyone who is hungry should eat something at home” (1 Corinthians 11:33-34). This is very different from both the Didache and the book of Acts. Paul’s correction is not that that the meal should be shared so that no one is hungry but that if anyone is hungry they should eat before showing up. We have now moved from an open, common meal (bread and wine) as a practice of resource-sharing and eliminating need within the community during the lifetime of Jesus to a meal practiced as a religious ritual where the Greco-Roman bread and wine are ritual memorial symbols of Jesus’ broken body (bread) and spilt blood (wine).
The gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke were all written after Paul’s letters and express this later ritualized meaning of Jesus’ last supper with his apostles, although even in Luke we see variations ways of practicing the ritual among some Jesus followers being represented.
The early Jesus community’s shared meal evolved away from a meal of real bread and fish among a hungry crowd of Jewish Jesus followers where open mutuality and sharing resulted in baskets of food left over. It became a ritualized meal appropriating the Greco-Roman “bread and wine” and symbolizing Jesus’ death among Christians. This evolution happened as Jesus followers’ social locations changed. What had begun as a Jewish peasant movement became more affluent by the time the gospels were written down. And as the church’s social location continued to transition toward prosperity, privilege, and power there would be many other changes in the Jesus movement as well. This may give us insight as to why so many expressions of Christianity today are strangely silent on matters of economic justice while engaged only in acts of philanthropic charity.
What can we glean from all of this today? Social location matters. How would it transform Christianity today for us to interpret the Jesus story once again from the perspective of communities that are marginalized and disenfranchised. I think of Jesus followers today who live their lives on the margins of their society and how differently they interpret the Jesus stories from those in more economically and socially privileged social locations. As I consider how the Eucharist changed over two millennia of Christian tradition and arguments still waged over bread and wine, body and blood, and theologies of the meaning of Jesus death, I still believe all of this distracts us from practicing the actual teachings of the Jesus of our stories. These practices that eliminated need among the early community (Acts 4:34). I can’t help but wonder, in a world so filled with need today, what would happen if we Jesus followers de-evolved our Jesus story and returned back to the interpretations of those living on the edges and margins? Could Jesus’ teachings once again return to the intrinsic, life-giving relevancy once encountered by those who first listened to the words of this Jewish prophet of the poor from Galilee?
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. How does the ritual of Eucharist shape your own Jesus following and social engagement today? Share and 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 24: John 6.51-58. Lectionary B, Proper 15
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
https://youtu.be/FCHmsbosSxc?si=3sLHd_r7I3cOVuMl
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 18: The Evolution of the Eucharist
John 6:51-58
“The early Jesus community’s shared meal evolved away from a meal of real bread and fish among a hungry crowd of Jewish Jesus followers where open mutuality and sharing resulted in baskets of food left over. It became a ritualized meal appropriating the Greco-Roman “bread and wine” and symbolizing Jesus’ death among Christians. This evolution happened as Jesus followers’ social locations changed. What had begun as a Jewish peasant movement became more affluent by the time the gospels were written down. And as the church’s social location continued to transition toward prosperity, privilege, and power there would be many other changes in the Jesus movement as well.”
Available on all major podcast carriers and at:
Ecological Justice, Economic Justice, Feminism, Immigration Justice, Racial Justice, LGBTQ Justice,
Liberation Theology, Lectionary Reading, Social Justice, Bread and Cup, Eucharist, Johnhttps://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/the-evolution-of-the-eucharist
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?
Free Sign Up Here
The Bread of Life
Thank You!
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, August 10, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our lectionary reading from the gospels this week is from the gospel of John:
Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
At this the Jews there began to grumble about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I came down from heaven’?”
“Stop grumbling among yourselves,” Jesus answered. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them, and I will raise them up at the last day. It is written in the Prophets: ‘They will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me. No one has seen the Father except the one who is from God; only he has seen the Father. Very truly I tell you, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.” (John 6:35, 41-51)
Any responsible commentary on the gospel of John must repeatedly correct the way the Jews as a whole are repeatedly villainized over and over again in the gospel of John. During the years this gospel was written, this was a debate on the inside of the Jewish community between varying Jewish voices. Christianity was separating from its Jewish roots and seeking to distinguish itself for political reasons. As benign as some commentators say that separation may have been originally, John Dominic Crossan rightly demonstrates that the rhetoric by Christians against the Jewish community would become lethal once Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
As long as Christians were the marginalized and disenfranchised ones, such passion fiction about Jewish responsibility and Roman innocence did nobody much harm. But, once the Roman Empire became Christian, that fiction turned lethal . . . Externally, records of pagan contempt and records of pagan respect for Judaism started as soon as Greek culture and Roman power integrated in eastern Mediterranean into a somewhat united whole. Internally, divergent groups within Judaism opposed to one another in those same centuries with everything from armed opposition through rhetorical attacks to nasty name calling. Read, for example, Josephus on any other Jews he dislikes, or read the Qumran Essenes of Dead Sea Scrolls fame on those other Jews they opposed. Christianity began as a sect within Judaism and, here slowly, there swiftly, separated itself to become eventually a distinct religion. If all this had stayed on the religious level, each side could have accused and denigrated the other quite safely forever. But, by fourth century, Christianity was the official religion of the Roman Empire, and with the dawn of Christian Europe, anti-Judaism moved from theological debate to lethal possibility. (John Dominic Crossan, Who Killed Jesus?)
Especially when reading John, we must be honest about the narratives of Jewish rejection and Roman innocence found in this gospel. John’s version of the Jesus story has led to untold harm from Christians to the Jewish community throughout the centuries. In the synoptic gospels, Jesus is opposed by the powerful, propertied, and privileged within the Jewish Temple State and loved and embraced by the poor, marginalized, and disenfranchised Jewish populace. In John, the story becomes flattened and Jesus is opposed by the Jewish community as a whole. In the synoptics, Jesus debates with other Jewish voices within Judaism, a Jewish voice arguing with Jewish voices. In John, his debates move outside of Judaism, a debate of Christians versus Jews. And once we add the later backing of the Roman Empire and later European countries, John’s gospel sows the seeds that would grow into full blown anti-semitism and eventually the Holocaust of six million European Jews and eleven million others in the 20th century. Supremacism never stays where it starts. The myth of Jewish rejection and Roman innocence must be rejected by responsible Jesus followers today.
What can we glean from this week’s reading in John?
This week’s reading is a reminder of how John’s gospel tends to spiritualize the material, minimize the material, and lift up Jesus—not as an agent of change in our material world but as the means whereby we can escape or transcend our material world including death:
“Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die.”
What this week’s reading draws our focus to once again is how important it is that our Jesus following is more than a way to manage the end of our lives or reconcile us to the fact that we will die. Jesus following that has become mere death management is, ironically, death-dealing. Jesus following should call us to consider how we live while we are alive! Jesus following focused only on navigating our dying intrinsically and negatively affects by omission how we live our lives, shape our communities, create societies, and the larger world each of us lives in. When our Jesus following is only about saving souls in an effort to manage our fear of dying, too often we become oblivious to the marginalization and material injustice, oppression, and violence many are suffering today. We become disengaged from the work of shaping our world into a safe, compassionate, just home for everyone and our insipid focus becomes only about getting to heaven. This way of following Jesus is almost wholly unrecognizable from the Jesus story we read about in Mark, Matthew, and Luke where Jesus is much more engaged with people’s lives. Yes, John’s gospel is all about how Jesus transforms death into a portal to life. But the synoptics’ Jesus is all about saving people from the hell they are enduring right now!
The kind of Jesus following that is only about managing fear of death is also convenient for those in positions of power who benefit and are privileged by unjust systems and ways of shaping our societies. Death-management-only Christianity leaves unjust systems unchallenged, unchanged, and thus untouched. This is why a heaven-focused version of Christianity is often promoted by people in power. They know that a Christianity that is other-world-focused leaves this world, their world, unchanged. I’m reminded of the words of Howard Thurman: “The opposition to those who work for social change does not come only from those who are the guarantors of the status quo. Again and again it has been demonstrated that the lines are held by those whose hold on security is sure only as long as the status quo remains intact.” (Jesus and the Disinherited, p. 14)
We would do well to remember that people don’t get beheaded like John for only showing people a path to heaven. People don’t get crucified like Jesus for only passing out tickets to heaven. People meet those ends when they become a threat to the powerful within the status quo.
All of this reminds me that a gospel of love must be engaged in our material world. A gospel of love calls us not to minimize the importance of our material world, but, rooted and grounded in our gospel of love, to work to shape our world into a just place for everyone. Believing in a gospel of love summons us to the work of compassion, not just pulling people out of the harm our society too often plunges them in, but reshaping our society in ways that also mitigate or entirely remove that harm to begin with.
I’ll close this week with the words of Walter Rauschenbusch, a key figure in the Social Gospel movement of early 20th centuries, for your consideration. Though the Social Gospel movement was woefully silent on matters of racial justice, today we can choose to engage justice work much more inclusively, including issues of race, women’s rights, LGBTQ justice, and more.
Rauschenbusch reminds us that when we allow our Jesus following and our belief in a gospel of love to move us to engage our material world around us, this is simply “the old message of salvation, but enlarged and intensified. The individualistic gospel has taught us to see the sinfulness of every human heart and has inspired us with faith in the willingness and power of God to save every soul that comes to him. But it has not given us an adequate understanding of the sinfulness of the social order and its share in the sins of all individuals within it. It has not evoked faith in the will and power of God to redeem the permanent institutions of human society from their inherited guilt of oppression and extortion. Both our sense of sin and our faith in salvation have fallen short of the realities under its teaching. The social gospel seeks to bring humans under repentance for their collective sins and to create a more sensitive and more modern conscience. It calls on us for the faith of the old prophets who believed in the salvation of nations” (Walter Rauschenbusch, A Theology for the Social Gospel, p. 5-6)
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. How is your following Jesus about more than what happens to us in an afterlife? How does your Jesus following define how you show up in our world here and now? Share and 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 23: John 6.35, 41-51. Lectionary B, Proper 14
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 17: The Bread of Life
John 6:35, 41-51
“The kind of Jesus following that is only about managing fear of death is also convenient for those in positions of power who benefit and are privileged by unjust systems and ways of shaping our societies. Death-management-only Christianity leaves unjust systems unchallenged, unchanged, and thus untouched. This is why a heaven-focused version of Christianity is often promoted by people in power. They know that a Christianity that is other-world-focused leaves this world, their world, unchanged. Faith that has become mere death management is, ironically, death-dealing. Faith should first do no harm. It should call us to consider how we show up in our world while we are alive and inspire us to shape our shared world into a compassionate, safe home for everyone.”
Available on all major podcast carriers,
Or at this link:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/the-bread-of-life
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
Are you getting all of RHM’s Free Resources?
Free Sign Up Here
Not Spiritualizing the Material
Thank You!
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, August 3, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our gospel reading from this lectionary this weekend is from the gospel of John:
Once the crowd realized that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they got into the boats and went to Capernaum in search of Jesus.
When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?”
Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him God the Father has placed his seal of approval.”
Then they asked him, “What must we do to do the works God requires?”
Jesus answered, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”
So they asked him, “What sign then will you give that we may see it and believe you? What will you do? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
Jesus said to them, “Very truly I tell you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
“Sir,” they said, “always give us this bread.”
Then Jesus declared, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” (John 6:24-35)
The gospel of John, the Johannine community’s version of the Jesus story, became a text during the second generation of Jesus followers who honored John’s apostleship. This makes it the latest gospel to be written in our scriptural canon. The Johannine community was not distanced from the original Jesus movement’s Jewish roots but the social location of the Jesus movement and Jesus followers had largely changed. Early Jesus followers were largely illiterate and practiced an oral tradition. Being able to read and even write was a privilege that only belonged to the wealthy. So the fact that the Jesus story began being put into written form tells us that wealthy Jesus followers had joined the movement. Many still only heard that story read to them each weekend, but that fact that a house church movement possessed people who could both write down the Jesus story and read it to the congregation demonstrated that the community was changing.
One of the many unique elements we encounter in the gospel of John and not in the other three gospels, is its tendency to convert material things into spiritual ones, and to then emphasize the spiritual as so much more important. This tendency is why so many Jesus scholars associate John’s gospel with early Christian gnosticism. (The patristic church father Iraneaus also associated the gospel of John with the gnostics in his Against Heresies.)
Being so heavenly minded that we are no earthly good means being focused on eternal bliss and the afterlife to the exclusion of being engaged, right now, in what people are materially experiencing in their concrete lives. It means being focused on saving souls while ignoring the suffering bodies. Over and over again in Christian history, this has produced destructive and death dealing fruit.
In one of James Cone’s final books, he warns of emphasizing the spiritual over the material.
And yet the Christian gospel is more than a transcendent reality, more than “going to heaven when I die, to shout salvation as I fly.” It is also an immanent reality—a powerful liberating presence among the poor right now in their midst, “building them up where they are torn down and propping them up on every leaning side.” The gospel is found wherever poor people struggle for justice, fighting for their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Bee Jenkins’s claims that “Jesus won’t fail you” was made in the heat of the struggle for civil rights in Mississippi, and such faith gave her strength and courage to fight for justice against overwhelming odds. Without concrete signs of divine presence in the lives of the poor, the gospel becomes simply an opiate; rather than liberating the powerless from humiliation and suffering, the gospel becomes a drug that helps them adjust to this world by looking for “pie in the sky.” (James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, p. 155)
In the gospel of John, we encounter a version of the Jesus story where Jesus says, “Very truly I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”
We need to hold this in tension with the versions of Jesus we encounter in the other canonical gospels. In those gospels we encounter a Jesus who wants his followers to work for and pray for our material world to match the heavenly world:
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matthew 6:10)
We encounter a Jesus who holds up the material, concrete, and not spiritualized liberation that people were experiencing as a result of his work and that testified of his legitimacy:
“The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.” (Matthew 11:5)
Our daily bread wasn’t spiritualized. That every person would be able to have and eat their actual, material, daily bread was something his followers were to work and pray for:
“Give us today our daily bread.” (Matthew 6:11)
Not spiritualizing but alleviating people’s material suffering was also lifted up as the litmus test in these gospels’ descriptions of a final judgement:
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me . . . for whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” (Matthew 25:34-40)
Caring about our and others’ material needs, especially others who were oppressed, was rooted in the tradition of the Hebrew prophets:
“If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” (Isaiah 58:10)
Again, the picture of a God who was concerned with supplying people’s material needs rather than spiritualizing them away is rooted in the soil of the Jewish wisdom that the Jesus movement grew out of:
“He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.” (Psalm 146:7)
And when we consider the early Jesus movement located in Jerusalem as contrasted with the Jesus moment of the Johannine community two generations later, we see resource-sharing, mutual aid, as well as hunger and poverty elimination as a central characteristic of how the early movement followed Jesus:
“With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.”(Acts 4:33-35)
Outside of the gospels, my favorite New Testament book is the book of James. Here too we see the material contrasted with the spiritual. But James explains that if we focus on the spiritual to the exclusion of the material, it makes our focus on spiritual realities absolutely no good.
“Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it?” (James 2:15-16)
What can we take away from this? Today, some Christians contrast saving souls with the work of social justice. There is no reason to pit the saving of souls against social justice work. Saving bodies is just as much a part of the Jesus tradition as savings souls is. In fact, in the synoptic gospels, social justice is a requirement for genuinely following Jesus. How is social justice still a requirement for you?
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. How is social justice engagement a part of your Jesus following? Share and 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
Thank you for listening to The Social Jesus Podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if the podcast platform you’re using offers this option, please leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our YouTube show each week called “Just Talking”. Each week, Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend. We’ll be talking about each reading in the context of love, inclusion, and social 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 23: John 6.24-35. Lectionary B, Proper 13
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
https://youtu.be/bE8gDo-xEVk?si=wIN4tbmpOquEAfKM
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 16: Not Spiritualizing the Material
John 6:24-35
“There is no reason to pit the saving of souls against social justice work. Saving bodies is just as much a part of the Jesus tradition as savings souls is. In fact, in the synoptic gospels, social justice engagement is a requirement for genuinely following Jesus.”
Available on all major podcast carriers,
Or at this link:
https://the-social-jesus-podcast.simplecast.com/episodes/not-spiritualizing-the-material
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
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Transcending and Escaping or Engaging and Transforming
Thank You!
We want to take this moment to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of our supporters for your invaluable role in the Renewed Heart Ministry community and for your dedication to our mission of fostering love, justice, compassion, and healing. Your support is the bedrock of our work. Your support empowers us to do what we do. At a time when ministries like ours are being asked to achieve more with fewer resources, your support is incredibly important, and we want to simply say thank you. Whether in our larger society or within our local faith communities, Renewed Heart Ministries remains committed to advocating for change, working towards a world that is inclusive, just, and safe for everyone, and being a source of love in our world. From all of us here at Renewed Heart Ministries, thank you for your generous support. We deeply appreciate each and every one of our supporters.
If you’d like to join them in supporting our work, please go to renewedheartministries.com and click on “Donate.”
Herb Montgomery, July 27, 2024
If you’d like to listen to this week’s article in podcast version click on the image below:
Our lectionary reading from the gospels this week is from the gospel of John:
Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the signs he had performed by healing the sick. Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. The Jewish Passover Festival was near.
When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
Philip answered him, “It would take more than half a year’s wages to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!”
Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”
Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down (about five thousand men were there). Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.
When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.
When evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, where they got into a boat and set off across the lake for Capernaum. By now it was dark, and Jesus had not yet joined them. A strong wind was blowing and the waters grew rough. When they had rowed about three or four miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water; and they were frightened. But he said to them, “It is I; don’t be afraid.” Then they were willing to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the shore where they were heading. (John 6:1-21)
This reading is one version of the feeding of the multitude stories in the canonical gospels. John’s account is wholly independent from any of the others: it’s not based on Mark’s two versions like those in Matthew and Luke. The Jesus story was originally told through an oral tradition of the miracle stories of Jesus. And although all of the gospels may have had a common ancestor in these stories, John’s version is a bit different.
For starters, unlike Mark’s, Matthew’s and Luke’s versions, John’s story isn’t about food justice and making sure the material needs of everyone in the Jesus community are being met. John is using this story for a narrative purpose: to set up the bread of life controversy in verses 16-71. This controversy, which has roots in the gnostic desire to transcend death, is only mentioned by John’s gospel and also is very out of place with what we would expect a Jewish rabbi like the synoptic Jesus to say:
“‘Here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.’ Then the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.’” (John 6:50-56)
The bread of life controversy in John has always been a source of debate within Christianity, and, I believe, a distraction. John’s gospel uses the feeding of the multitude story to set up a theological debate whereas the synoptic gospels use various versions of this story to teach about resource-sharing, mutual aid, feeding the hungry, and clothing the naked. Meeting the material needs of those in our communities resonates much more deeply with me than arguing over what Jesus meant by drinking blood and eating flesh.
In true Johannine fashion, when the people try to make Jesus king by force, Jesus departs. In John’s gospel, Jesus’ kingdom is not material but ethereal (John 3:3, 5). Unlike the synoptics’ kingdom theme, the kingdom in John has very little to do with challenging, confronting, or changing anything about how the kingdoms of this world operate (John 18:36). In the synoptics, the kingdom theme describes that which has come from God to impact and transform our present world. But in John, Jesus kingdom is about transcending our present world with all of its challenges and transforming death into a portal to postmortem bliss.
I’ve made it no secret that my soul resonates more deeply with the synoptics’ version of the kingdom. We should be about transforming our world, not escaping it. We should be about making our present world a safe, compassionate, just home for all, not becoming so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good.
It is also true that in the synoptic gospels Jesus rejects being king. In the temptation stories of Matthew and Luke, Jesus refuses a position of power at the helm of the kingdoms of this world. This could be argued as a rejection of the empires of this world and their peace through military violence: Jesus’ kingdom in the synoptics is about bringing about peace on earth through distributive justice.
John’s rejection of kingship is quite different. The Johannine Jesus rejects being made king by force because he is much more concerned with giving his followers a way to transcend the injustice in our world than with engaging and transforming it.
All of the gospel communities would have had a lot to say to those in the Christian “moral majority” today seeking political power to enforce their version of morality. Jesus followers historically have never handled political power well. When Christians have become “king,” we have tended to deal more death than give life. And while I do believe there is a time and place to influence how our societies are shaped in our effort to make our world a more just home for everyone, the morality of the Christian right isn’t about making our world safe for everyone and ensuring that everyone has enough to thrive, but about enforcing their beliefs regarding how they believe everyone in society should behave. Those beliefs are worth taking a look at and challenging.
Lastly in this week’s reading from John, we have a version of the story of Jesus walking on water. This story portrays Jesus as transcending our material existence. In the synoptics the story demonstrates the power of Jesus and Jesus’ teachings to transform our material world. For John, Jesus is above it all, leading us on a path of transcendence.
What does this have to say to us today?
A focus on transcending this world comes from John’s gospel. But as Jesus followers, we must allow ourselves to be confronted by the fact that that focus has not always produced good fruit. Coming away to rest and be refreshed is not transcendence or escape. It’s to recharge so we can continue our work. The synoptic gospels admonish us as Jesus followers to engage our world, to transform it, to work alongside others working to shape our world into a home for everyone, a home where everyone has their needs met, a home that is safe, rooted in distributive justice, and founded on compassion and the recognition that each of us bears the image of the Divine and is part of one another.
I long for the day when Christianity in the U.S. makes the news for pushing that agenda.
Discussion Group Questions
1. Share something that spoke to you from this week’s eSight/Podcast episode with your discussion group.
2. How does the Jesus story help you engage our world around us? Share and 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.
My latest book Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political and Economic Teachings of the Gospels is available now on Amazon in paperback, Kindle and also on Audible in audio book format.
As always, you can find Renewed Heart Ministries each week on X (or Twitter), Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s Threads. If you haven’t done so already, please follow us on your chosen social media platforms for our daily posts.
If you would like to listen to these articles each week in podcast form, you can find The Social Jesus podcast on all major podcast carriers. If you enjoy listening to The Social Jesus Podcast please take a moment to like and subscribe and if your podcast platform offers this option, consider taking some time to leave us a positive review. This helps others find our podcast as well.
You can watch our new YouTube show called “Just Talking” each week. Todd Leonard and I take a moment to talk 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.
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.
New Episode of “Just Talking” Now Online!
Season 2, Episode 22: John 6.1-21. Lectionary B, Proper 12
Each week, we’ll be talking about the gospel lectionary reading for the upcoming weekend in the context of love, inclusion, and social justice. Our hope is that our talking will be “just” talking (as in justice) and that during our brief conversations each week we’ll be inspired to 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 at:
New Episode of The Social Jesus Podcast
A podcast where we talk about the intersection of faith and social justice and what a first century, prophet of the poor from Galilee might have to offer us today in our work of love, compassion and justice.
This week:
Season 1 Episode 15: Transcending and Escaping or Engaging and Transforming
John 6:1-21
“A focus on transcending this world comes from John’s gospel. But as Jesus followers, we must allow ourselves to be confronted by the fact that that focus has not always produced good fruit. The synoptic gospels admonish us as Jesus followers to engage our world, to transform it, to work alongside others working to shape our world into a home for everyone, a home where everyone has their needs met, a home that is safe, rooted in distributive justice, and founded on compassion and the recognition that each of us bears the image of the Divine and is part of one another.”
Available on all major podcast carriers,
Or at this link:
Now Available on Audible!
Finding Jesus: A Fundamentalist Preacher Discovers the Socio-Political & Economic Teachings of the Gospels.
by Herb Montgomery, Narrated by Jeff Moon
Available now on Audible!
After two successful decades of preaching a gospel of love within the Christian faith tradition Herb felt like something was missing. He went back to the gospels and began reading them through the interpretive lenses of various marginalized communities and what he found radically changed his life forever. The teachings of the Jesus in the gospel stories express a profound concern for justice, compassion, and the well-being of those in marginalized communities. This book navigates the intersections between faith and societal justice, and presents a compelling argument for a more socially compassionate and just expression of Christianity. Herb’s findings in his latest book are shared in the hopes that it will dramatically impact how you practice your Christianity, too.
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