"Teacher" (Mark 9:38-50)

Jesus lived at the crossroads of Greek and Jewish culture. Both those ancient cultures featured wisdom taught by sage teachers who attracted followers seeking to learn from them. There were many such teachers.

However, the names of only a few are remembered today. And of these, the name of Jesus is remembered most.

A great teacher is just one aspect of who Jesus was, but it’s an important one. Without his wisdom and eloquence, it’s doubtful that he would have gained the following he did.

Wisdom teaching has a long history in Judaism. The authors of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes were all teachers of wisdom. They have many similarities, but also significant differences.

Job, for example, is basically one long story. It’s a book-length parable about a man named Job who suffered yet never lost his faith in God. Friends came and offered their own theological explanations for his suffering, but in the end, their theological explanations fall short – just as many of our modern explanations for why there is suffering fall short.

Proverbs, on the other hand, is mostly a series of short sayings, each of which is just one or two sentences in length. There is no narrative or story, just brief utterances, most of which are short enough that they could easily be tweeted, if twitter was around then.

 Scholars call these short sayings aphorisms.

Jesus taught using both parables and aphorisms. Why? Because they are memorable. You hear the parable of the prodigal son, or the good Samaritan, and you never forget them.

And the same for the short sayings, the aphorisms, that he shared, the sayings that get a lot of attention were Jesus to post them on twitter.

“If your hand causes you to sin, chop it off.  It is better to live with no hand than to have two hands and be thrown into hell.”

This saying was in today’s reading. We also heard two others like it, about a foot that causes you to sin, and an eye that causes you to sin. It’s short. It’s memorable. It’s deep. It seems simple, yet it causes you to think.

“If a blind person leads another blind person, they will both fall into a ditch.”

This saying is so memorable that it’s become a part of our modern speech. People talk about the “blind leading the blind,” and some of them don’t even know that this saying originated with Jesus.

These aphorisms usually have multiple meanings. The first meaning is the literal meaning: a blind person leading another blind person. Obviously, they will stumble along.

But there is a deeper meaning. Jesus isn’t really talking about blind people, is he? He’s talking about those religious leaders who are so in cahoots with Rome that they no longer even know what it means to follow God… and yet they are the ones leading the people.

And when he talks about a hand that causes you to sin, he’s not really talking about a hand. Or a foot, or an eye. And probably, he’s not really talking about hell as we think of hell, as a literal place. But he is serious about getting rid of whatever it is that keeps you from God, whatever keeps you from following Jesus.

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.”

 This is another aphorism of Jesus. Aphorisms often got Jesus into trouble.  They flipped the script – and some people didn’t want the script flipped. In this case, the people who considered themselves holy and righteous were upset that Jesus would associate with outcasts, the unclean, and non-Jews. They thought that a religious leader like Jesus should only hang out with the good people, the people who were pure and clean. When Jesus made the comment about the sick needing a doctor, he was implying that God’s presence needed to be where the hurt people were, the outcasts, the ones society considered “sinners.” No wonder the people who thought of themselves as holy and righteous got angry.

“Whoever wants to be first must be last.”

We heard this one last week. The truth is, this saying appears a number of times in the gospels. Jesus probably said each of these things more than once. They were one-liners that he spoke frequently and repeatedly: little nuggets of wisdom that were too good to use only once.

Through aphorisms like these, and parables that we’ve heard over and over again, Jesus demonstrated that he was a masterful teacher. When he spoke, the crowd was in awe. He passionately believed what he was saying, which allowed him to speak with great authority. He was authentic, and his hearers knew that.

I think that’s one of the things that has made Pope Francis so popular. I think it’s clear to a lot of people that he teaches what he believes. He’s not concerned as much with preserving the church, the institution, as he is following Jesus, and faithfully carrying out God’s will.

In Jesus’s time, the other religious leaders were obligated to Rome, and so they had to teach in a way that wouldn’t get Rome upset. Things like personal purity and righteousness were okay to teach, but social justice, helping the poor, or anything that might alter the current social structure… such teachings could get one in trouble.

Maybe some of the religious leaders wished they could teach such things, but they feared what would happen. The church (or in this case, the temple) might have to give up some of its wealth and power in the world to actually live as God desires, doing the ministry that God wants. And the leaders might lose some of their importance in society, their influence and their wealth. Their positions of power. You don’t want to upset the wrong people.

Even today there are preachers who soften their message because they are afraid they might upset people.

Jesus was full of wisdom. And with his spirit so fully aligned with God, he had no fear in proclaiming it.

Sometimes a story is the only way to convey wisdom. King David had done something terrible, something sinful, and apparently he didn’t even realize what he had done. One day the prophet Nathan came to David… and told him a story.

It was a story about a shepherd who had many sheep, yet stole the one sheep belonging to a poor neighbor of his.

At the end of the story, Nathan asked David what should be done to this greedy shepherd, and David said he should no doubt be punished. Nathan then said to David, “you are that man.”

Just as David was made to see himself in Nathan’s story, we need to see ourselves in the stories of Jesus… and sometimes we need someone to help us see it in a new way.  Sometimes we aren’t who we think we are.

In the parable of the prodigal son, are we the son who is lost until he returns home and is embraced by the loving, forgiving arms of his father?

Or are we his brother, watching this, filled with resentment because we have done everything right, and yet the grace and love of our father goes to someone who, in our eyes, clearly does not deserve it?

What if the story is set in modern times, and the younger son is on welfare; do we resent him for receiving what we work so hard for?

We need the wisdom of Jesus. We need to hear his stories and aphorisms, and we need to reinterpret them. We need to see ourselves in them, and we need to understand that who we are in these stories isn’t always who we think we are.

One last thing. In addition to being a teacher of wisdom, scripture regards Jesus as wisdom itself. John’s gospel begins, “In the beginning was the Word.” The “word,” in this case, is logos, wisdom, also known in Greek as Sophia. The wisdom that is embodied in Jesus is the wisdom of God.

I don’t know about you, but because this wisdom is so deep and profound, I find that just hearing it expressed isn’t enough. I need to hear it, and then I need to wrestle with it. As I said, it is wisdom that often flips the script - it completely uproots what I think or what is often thought.

We all need times to individual silent reflection and prayer. We also all need times of conversation with others who, like us, are trying to hear and understand and live by the wisdom of Jesus. The two-day racism training that Lisa Tunstall and I attended just over a week ago provided just such an opportunity… the conversations we had around the table contained much wisdom.

I hope that we at Bixby Knolls Christian Church can find times of wisdom sharing in our life together. I know we have our appreciative inquiry event in two weeks, and I can’t stress to you how important it is to have you there. There is definitely new life, a new spirit, in our congregation, and we need Christ’s wisdom to help us discern what direction God wants us to take, how we can honor our 70-year history while looking to a new and bright future.

The wisdom that Christ teaches is a wisdom that is so desperately needed in our world today. Just this week we’ve heard news about pharmaceutical executives raising the prices on life-saving drugs by hundreds of dollars, and automobile companies rigging the software in their vehicles so they can cheat the smog test system; and last Sunday afternoon, as I stood atop Runyon Canyon overlooking Hollywood, I was amazed that I could see all the way to Long Beach, all the way to Mt. Baldy and Santiago Peak, even all the way to San Nicolas Island! I gave thanks for the smog tests and other regulations that have cleaned up our air considerably since I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. To have people at Volkswagen think it’s ok to cheat the system not only jeopardizes the great views I had, but the health of millions of people.

So this world desperately needs the wisdom of Christ. In my life, and in our community, the ministry of Bixby Knolls Christian Church has been vital to the sharing of that wisdom. God needs us to keep this ministry thriving and growing, which is why I do ask you to please consider carefully and prayerfully what you can give and what you can pledge to the church in the coming year.

I don’t like talking about money, but I do so love the ministry of this congregation and the important role it plays in bringing the wisdom and the teachings of Christ to the world. Please, be generous when you fill out your pledge cards and bring them to church next week. Together, let’s use what we have learned to transform this fragmented world into a world of wholeness and joy.