20th Sunday after Pentecost

Sermon: 20th Sunday after Pentecost, 10/6/2024, Baptism of Levi Bell Vitale
Text: Mark 10: 2-16
Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Jesus said to the Pharisees: “Because of your hardness of heart, He gave you this commandment”. That phrase, hardness of heart, in the original Greek of Mark’s Gospel it is one word: sklerokardían. Sounds like a medical diagnosis doesn’t it? A hard heart, in accordance with the root of this word, is a heart that is hard because it has been dried out; it is stiff, unyielding, and harsh. What happens when a human being walks the earth with a dried out heart? What kind of relationships do they build? I think we can think of many examples of human beings whose dried out hearts create environments that reflect their inner condition. They make deserts out of lush landscapes. In a sense, all of us carry a hardening condition within us. As we live, we are more and more exposed to different agents that make our hearts unyielding as stone. Jesus makes a point of what a dried out heart does in real human situations in today’s Gospel reading. And Jesus connects such a condition to one major factor: the abandonment of God’s original desire for humanity, our drifting away from our loving, caring and life-nurturing purpose.
The pharisees pose to Jesus a question on divorce to see how he will respond, to see if He is consonant with the proper application of the law. But Jesus, as always, goes beyond the mere letter of the law. He goes deeper into the intentions of the heart, into the initial desire of God for human flourishing. Jesus knows that His ministry is the advent of God’s Kingdom, the restoration of all things to their fullest goodness. When He is confronted with the divorce question, we should not hear His words as simply an utter rejection of divorce. His commandment is radical in another way. Divorce is a fraught word in our culture, as much as it was in Jesus’ time. We should be careful of equating divorce in this text and haphazardly setting it on our unique context. But in the customs of ancient Judaism, divorce was first and foremost the privilege of the husband. If we define hard heartedness as the inability to care, or as the failure to bother to love my neighbor (in marriage the closest being one’s spouse), then divorce was clearly outside the purview of God’s desire. Divorce in this context equated to destitution for the wife and children affected by the husband’s decision. Marriage in this case safeguarded the socio-economic condition of women in a patriarchal society. On another level, as Jesus refers, marriage is supposed to reflect the image of God’s own radical commitment to human beings. God is incapable of leaving us destitute, He holds our hands tightly, like the mutual grasp of the hands of lovers. To persist in marriage, in the logic of Jesus’ answer, is to persist in caring, to keep our hearts soft with the vulnerability of love. “What God has joined, let no one separate”, indeed, God’s desire is not separation, He is ever drawing us closer to Himself, closer to each other in relationships of mutual charity. And thus, we can see why divorce as a practice was very far from God’s plan in Jesus’ mind in this text. When the crux is between caring and harshness, when it’s between justice and injustice, Jesus has a clear vision of where the Kingdom of God stands.

And then after this teaching in Mark’s Gospel, we immediately see another instance of caring in contrast to hardness of heart. Children, another vulnerable population of the human race, are being brought to Jesus so that He might bless them. But the disciples sternly tried to stop the people from doing so. They were creating a perimeter around Jesus, as if the Christ was too lofty to pay attention to these powerless human beings. But Jesus didn’t like that one bit. He didn’t accept that a barrier was being formed between Him and the families asking for a blessing. To which Jesus responds: “Let the children come to me; do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”. The Kingdom, Jesus says, belongs to the powerless, the little, the uncared for, those which society cannot be bothered to love. Children rarely are able to “prove their worth” in the world’ eyes, even more in the ancient world. Children are always an active question seeking to blossom into whatever future life has in store for them, they cannot prove or strive for power, for they are utterly dependent. They need care, they need someone to bother to love them, they need someone to be with them as they grow into adulthood and finally reach autonomy. So if the Kingdom belongs to ones such as these, it means that to enter the Kingdom of God, or better yet, to receive it, we must inhabit our fundamental powerlessness, littleness, and vulnerability, we must recognize that even in adulthood, we are dependent upon the good graces of God. No man is an island, and so to be truly human as God intended we ought to be aware of the constellation or web of relationships that care us into being, beginning with our Father in Heaven.

So what is the response of God to this state of being of ours? How does God show us the way from hard heartedness into a soft heart that reaches for the destitute and the vulnerable? The last verse of our text today: “And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.” The antidote to a dried up heart: to embrace this weak and weary world. To take up the vulnerable into your arms, to lay your hands on them, to bless them, meaning to say a good word that reveals or revives the belovedness of a heart that is made to pulsate with life. Like Jesus, we are tasked to care, especially for those that are cast down. God in Jesus Christ is the evidence of a God that cares for us. For He comes down to us and takes us up in His everlasting arms and wraps us with the cloth of Christ, makes us His, He whispers good words into our ears and makes us rest in the peace and joy of being cared for. It is thus appropriate that we were able to witness the baptism of baby Levi today. For the sacraments preach to us the Gospel, God saying to us: You are my beloved son, in you I am well pleased. You are fearfully and wonderfully made, I love you, with the water and the Word I remind you forever that I embrace you. John and Alexandria, what you have witnessed today is the ever-affirming Yes of God, an eternal reminder that Levi lovingly belongs to God, just as you also belong to God. We are complete with God’s gifts for us, we have witnessed today an act that shoos away the hardness of heart by the water and the Word; God does not leave us to dry out. We are made truly human today, we are made more caring today, we are made more godly today, all through the Grace of Him who cares infinitely for us, and is not ashamed of our weakness. Let us pray and praise the One who freely showers us with these gifts: