Given the snow day in the Triangle today, I did not have the opportunity to deliver my sermon scheduled for today, February 1—but I did record it so that folks would have an opportunity to listen to what I had prepared. It’s on YouTube here.
There’s a family story that we’re related to a particularly famous “Tindall,” William Tyndale, who was the first to translate the Bible from the original languages into English, before he was famously killed at the behest of Henry VIII and Thomas More. The rumor is that some relative in upstate New York had the genealogy work all done, but no one in the family quite knows where it went after that relative died. I certainly haven’t had the time yet to do that work myself—Ancestry.com has only gotten me back to after the family came to the New World, but I did read a biography of his a few years ago to see if it said anything about his offspring. And then it hit me only a few pages in: Tyndale was a Catholic priest. Who are famously known for not having children—or at least not ones that genealogists know about.
But recently for a class on the English Reformation, we read some of Tyndale’s non-translation work. In his Obedience of a Christian Man, he spends time defending his choice to translate the scriptures into the vernacular. There was some tradition of this, of course, although both were translations from the Latin Vulgate—John Wycliff had translated it into Middle English around the time of Chaucer, and there was even an old Anglo-Saxon translation from Alfred the Great’s day. But none of these contained the rich language of Tyndale’s translation from the original language. He invented a number of words that still ring in our ears today: atonement, scapegoat, seashore, taskmaster, busybody, filthy lucre. Also some phrases: the powers that be (Rom. 13:1), the salt of the earth (Matt. 5:13), fight the good fight (1 Tim. 6:12). Along with Cranmer and Shakespeare, he really gave us modern English.
And in reading him, I found another phrase that I thought particularly full of charm and wit: juggler. It’s an accusation that he hurls at the Catholic Church of the day, that they are “jugglers of scripture.” In this, he is responding to the particular claim of the Pope to bear the sword—something Tyndale sees in flat contravention of Scripture—and says that the Catholic authorities need to juggle scripture to get around very plain and simple statements of Jesus’s, like when he tells Peter in Gethsemane to put away his sword because those who live by the sword will die by it. Tyndale’s answer was to get Scripture into the hands of everyone in a language that even the ploughboy would understand, so that the people would see through the juggling, and the truth of the gospel would shine through.
We stand as the heirs of his project, with our plentiful access to Scripture in a myriad of translations And… results are, well, mixed. It turns out that even ordinary people are quite good at juggling. Which is what I thought of when I read Jesus’ words in preparation for the sermon today. Blessed are the poor in spirit? Blessed are those who mourn? Blessed are those who hunger and thirst? My mind immediately runs—how I can I juggle those to not be confronted by them? Perhaps poverty of spirit means something in the Greek that will get me off the hook. I don’t know that I’ve known true hunger or thirst a day in my life, perhaps I can spiritualize those things away somehow? Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake—maybe I can think of a time that I was made fun of in elementary school for doing the right thing? Or a time I didn’t get a promotion at work because I refused to look the other way at some moment of unethical behavior? I don’t know how much of a candle that holds to getting crucified though…
Jesus is hard to listen to. These words are hard to listen to. And to listen to them, perhaps we need to stop for a moment—to put our balls down and stop juggling for a moment. To confront how hard they actually are.
“Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
Doesn’t that just sound unfair? To have all kinds of evil uttered against you—falsely? “Wait, Jesus, shouldn’t we speak up and clear our names?” To be persecuted, for doing the right thing? “Wait Jesus, shouldn’t we clear the record? Or perhaps strike back to defend ourselves against those who would unjustly wrong us?” How is this what’s expected of us, when the witness of the prophet is,
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of youbut to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?”
Isn’t justice everyone getting what they deserve? And if we don’t get the justice we deserve, then it’s our job to make sure we get what’s due to us? Isn’t it our job to be kind, but, well, isn’t there a limit to kindness, if we don’t receive kindness in return? What if we get taken advantage of? What if we can’t protect ourselves?
Let’s be honest: perhaps it sounds like foolishness. And it is foolishness, according to the world’s standards. The Apostle recognizes this. It is the message of the cross, the ultimate message where the all powerful God, incarnate in a human man, chose to take the world’s violence against him although he had done nothing wrong—although he had lived a completely just life. His disciples were flabbergasted—why aren’t we taking on the Romans? The chief priests and scribes mocked him, “will he not save himself?” And of course, he could have—but he did not. To those of this world, to those that are perishing, Paul says, this is complete foolishness.
If we’re really serious with how we might respond to these commands of Jesus, they may even make us angry. I’m a little angry at them, I do confess. I want to be able to protect myself, to make sure others treat me kindly, to make sure I’m treated justly. After all, I strive to do those things to others, why shouldn’t I get them in return?
Which made me think of another English theologian that I’ve encountered anew recently: Julian of Norwich. Julian was an anchoress in the 1300s who witnessed the Black Death up close, and who from her anchorite cell provided spiritual counsel to her town. Her Showings, only recently rediscovered, recount mystical visions she had of Christ. In it, she provocatively says that she finds no wrath in God—that God, in his grace, no longer has wrath towards us. Rather, she finds there to be wrath in humans. She writes:
For I saw no wrath but on man’s part; and that forgiveth He in us. For wrath is not else but a forwardness and a contrariness to peace and love; and either it cometh of failing of might, or of failing of wisdom, or of failing of goodness: which failing is not in God, but is on our part. For we by sin and wretchedness have in us a wretched and continuant contrariness to peace and to love.
It’s this contrariness to the ways of God, the contrariness to the ways of peace and mercy, that Julian finds to be the source of our wrath—a wrath that God’s mercy must ultimately slake, lest it consume us. And where God is, there is an end of wrath:
God is our very Peace, and He is our sure Keeper when we are ourselves in unpeace, and He continually worketh to bring us into endless peace. And thus when we, by the working of mercy and grace, be made meek and mild, we are fully safe; suddenly is the soul oned to God when it is truly peaced in itself: for in Him is found no wrath.
Julian’s vision of the ultimate reality things is perhaps best summed up in her most famous words: that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” And it’s this kind of faith, this kind of trust that gave Paul the strength to declare that the foolishness of the Cross was actually wisdom. It’s this kind of faith, this kind of trust, that gave Jesus the courage to not strike back against his persecutors and to endure the cross for our salvation.
It’s this kind of faith that allows us to see that these Beatitudes aren’t a way of relating to the world passively, like a spiritual doormat. But rather, we are the people who trust that God is ultimately the one who will bring us justice, who will bring us peace. We work for justice and peace to be sure, but not in the way that the world does, for the world’s peace is not God’s. The defensiveness, the name clearing, the violence—these all only provoke more of the same in our world, our world of wrath and contrariness. But the wisdom of the cross, the wisdom of the beatitudes, is to see through all of these attempts as the shams that they are, and to trust in the one who will ultimately make all things right, who ensures that all manner of thing shall be well.
So, let us then pray today that we would have the courage to live into this call—to put down our juggling balls, and instead to play the fool for Christ. Amen.
Leave a Reply