A Homily for the Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany
As the youngest child in my family, I often found myself on the losing end of fights with my older brother. This, of course, led me to seek out other ways that I might retaliate against him, which is how I learned, at a very young age, about the incredible power of words to harm.
More than anything I ever did or said, there was one name I called him that never failed to distress him to no end. I discovered it quite by accident in the heat of an argument with him when I called him the worst, most awful and despicable name possible.
I called him a …
Bendable.
Okra.
Head.
Still, to this day, I have no idea where that name came from, but it became the one weapon I had against my older brother and I used it mercilessly, to the point that my parents forbid me from saying it!
Anyone who has been around siblings or school-age children might have a similar story. Name-calling and insults can even be a kind of currency among high schoolers and, sadly, among some adults.
They say sticks and stones can break your bones, but words can never harm you. But, we all know that isn’t exactly true.
Jesus certainly doesn’t seem to think so at least in this week’s gospel. To him, angry, contemptuous name-calling is a form of violence on par with murder itself!
This startling suggestion kicks off perhaps one of Jesus’ most difficult and demanding series of teachings, where Jesus explains that lust is as bad as adultery, that saying anything more than yes or no when making a promise is evil, and, of course, that calling someone a ‘fool’ or an ‘idiot’ is pretty much the same as killing them.
Jesus takes the idea of character assassination literally.
Now, it can be easy to misread Jesus’ intent in this section of the Sermon on the Mount. And indeed, throughout Christian history, many have, using these teachings abusively to keep women in harmful marital relationships, to forcibly require those who have been oppressed or abused to reconcile with those who hurt them, or to imply that as people of faith we are to be pushovers.
But that’s not what Jesus is getting at in these passages. When Jesus teaches on anger, lust, marriage, courts, and making vows, he is entering into an existing debate about this hot topics with his own religious community. These are teachings about topics that are actively being debated within Jewish society. We could spend hours unpacking that cultural history for each one of these, and in many ways, because of all the nuances and contextual importance, this section of the sermon on the mount is probably better discussed in a classroom setting over several weeks that preached from a pulpit in a single sermon.
But if we take these teachings together, at their heart, they represent a profound call about how to live together as the people of God. They are about the call of disciples not to follow this list as a set of hard-and-fast rules, but a call to resist the pervasive forces of dehumanization and objectification in the world, that often overlooked temptation to use one another for our own personal gain, whether in the gratification of our desires and needs or in the scapegoating of others for our present difficulties.
Jesus teaching on divorce here certainly falls into this category. Often regarded as a blanket condemnation of divorce, Jesus is engaging with the practice of his own time in which women were powerless and subject to their husband’s whim when it came to divorce. In such situations, they were dehumanized objects – little better than property – to be divorced by their for any reason or no reason at all, leaving women economically and socially vulnerable in such a deeply patriarchal society. Jesus’ teaching on this subject here and in other gospels represents a protection against such exploitation and objectification.
But this morning, I find myself hearing anew Jesus’ difficult teaching about anger and murder. In our current world, I can think of few more important teachings for us to hear. We live in a society that runs on angry polarization, name-calling, insults, and scapegoating. We have seen it in our social media feeds, on our televisions, in the Episcopal Church, and in our government.
More than likely, if we are honest, we’ve participated in it to some extent. We’ve chosen to think of people on the other side of the aisle as somehow just stupid or ignorant folks who are ruining everything we love about life, or that if those folks who don’t act, think, or look like us move in down the street, well, then you better start locking your doors because there goes the neighborhood.
Now, to be absolutely clear, Jesus isn’t saying that all anger is sinful. There is an anger that comes from witnessing injustice that is holy and appropriate. Jesus, after all, does flip over the tables in the temple. Rather, it is a certain type of anger Jesus speaks of here, which the original Greek makes clear.
What Jesus is talking about here is the anger of utter contempt, cruel labeling, and scornful insults. It is the same kind of dehumanizing, disdainful, and derogatory name-calling from which so many of histories worst atrocities and injustices began. We find examples of this disturbing trend throughout history, in the way settlers and colonizers dehumanized indigenous people in this land as savages, cutting the path for atrocities like the Trail of Tears. The way slaveholders and slavetraders from antiquity to America referred to people as livestock or soulless animals only having the form of humans. We see it the way the Nazis spoke of Jewish people as subhuman, the way the Hutus called the Tutsis cockroaches in the lead up to the Rwandan genocide, the janjaweed in Sudan called their victims dogs and rats.
The list goes on and on. Any time we see the awful rhetoric of dehumanization leveled against entire groups of people we are in danger again of being thrown into the raging fires of hell on earth. Dehumanization is the volatile and dangerous fuel on which the engines of war, violence, bigotry, and exploitation run, until at last and inevitably, it catches fire and consumes itself and everything in its vicinity.
Now, perhaps all this seems a little dramatic and exaggerated, but I think Jesus insight is profound to know that this kind of angry and dehumanizing speech is never just empty or bloated rhetoric but the very seeds from which murder and evil can grow.
Modern philosopher David Livingstone Smith, in his 2012 book “Less than Human,” agrees. He explains that “it’s very difficult, psychologically to kill another human being up close and in cold blood or to inflict atrocities on them.” The process of dehumanization, though, he suggests, enables people to ignore those “very deep and natural inhibitions they have against treating people like game animals or vermin or dangerous predators.”
The terrible reason dehumanization works is that it makes us feel good. It’s ironic that something so evil can makes us feel so downright righteous and holy, because when we get sucked into dehumanizing others, suddenly we bear no responsibility for the problems in our lives or our communities because all the problems facing us are their fault and if we could just get rid of them, then everything would be just fine in the world.
And so Jesus’ set of teachings today, to me, represents the requirement as disciples to actively resist the forces of dehumanization in our world, not just when they balloon out of control into violence but when they are just beginning with the violence of name-calling, scapegoating, and labeling entire groups of people.
The solution Jesus offers us, however, is never simply to not dehumanize someone. In these teachings, Jesus sets an even higher standard than simply not sinning.
To Jesus, the law and the commandments weren’t about how to avoid sin and evil, but about how to live as God intends, liberated with each other, flourishing as a human family, and full of joy.
“So,” Jesus continues, “when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go: first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.”
We are to actively enter and be a part of the work of reconciliation in the world, the work of humanizing each other in the midst of a culture too often defined by dehumanization and demonization.
We are to humanize each other, even, and perhaps, especially our enemies.
That is our truest and best gift to God. The way we treat each other is our truest form of worship to God. The gift we bring to the altar isn’t our time, our money, or a set of beliefs, but how we have humanized each other, how we have refused to demonize each other.
Photo Credit: “Friendship” by Henk Kosters is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
The Rev. David Henson 