“The Wicked say …”
When I told my wife that I would be talking about wicked people today, she responded with a hopeful “Wicked-Awesome People?” Sadly, it seems that the wicked awesome people all come from the Boston area, so they are not found in today’s reading … but the sentiment is still the same …. because no-one truly wants to be associated with the “wicked” … nobody is the villain in their own story; however, that does leave us with a question … who exactly
Are the wicked?
Our first reading implies that the wicked might be identified by their desire to attack the just. We find that the wicked cannot live very long with the righteous before their guilt and resentment against the unspoken judgement they feel from the example of those living by God will pushes them to violence. Of course, the goal of their attacks … is not to destroy the righteous, but to corrupt them instead; because if they can provoke the righteous to respond in kind, they believe that proves that the righteous are no better than they are … and, even more importantly, that wicked are no worse than righteous. They believe that this gave them an excuse to do whatever they want just because they had the Power to do it. In fact, just before the wicked called on each other to “beset the just one,” we would have heard the wicked say that their strength was the only true measure of righteousness and that weakness was good for nothing. In other words … they live by the creeds of might makes right and the ends justifies the means!
Okay … so now we can identify the wicked … it gets a little trickier when we try to identify the righteous. Biblical scholar Marcus Borg noted that when he asked Christian audiences about what comes to mind when they heard the word righteous, some of the terms they associated with that were: “holier-than-thou, judgmental, condemnatory, hypocritical, priggish, legalistic, moralistic, full-of-themselves, pompous, and arrogant.” That is quite an ugly “unrighteous” list … and I have to wonder … How did we get here?
Perhaps it is because … like the wicked in our reading … we are seduced by what the world tells us is important. In fact, like the wicked, there seems to be something about our fallen human nature that drives us to be first, to be right, and most of all, to be important. We are conditioned to worry about how the world sees us … where we rank in society in comparison to those around us … Even the disciples were not immune to this desire; In today’s Gospel … after they were told that their time with Jesus was coming to an end, they immediately became preoccupied with where they were in the pecking order of God’s Kingdom. To be fair, should not have been entirely unexpected. Questions about hierarchies and precedence were a topic of much discussion among the teachers and elites of the time. At table, in the synagogues, … even in the street, the question of the place of honor Always came up. Everyone was a part of some hierarchy … even the saints in heaven were ranked according to their merits while the people of the world were cataloged and ranked as well … with the righteous at the top of course … and the wicked at the bottom … just above the poor and the marginalized of the community.
And so the Gospel tells is once again, that Jesus acted to correct the disciples misunderstanding … and he completely flips the current accepted hierarchy upside down by declaring the Least to be the greatest before then telling His disciples to be a servant to everyone. The greek word for servant used here is diakonos, from which we get the word deacon … a word that has recently taken a much deeper meaning for me personally. But Jesus is not done with His lesson. Charging His disciples to be a servant to all, Jesus goes off on an apparent tangent by presenting a child to them as an example. Now … I have to admit, it can be difficult to see the connection here … at least in english. So I went hunting for the missing link. Many of the commentaries that I consulted had primarily focused on the vulnerability of a child, who, having no legal standing or protection at all in that society, might be seen as representing the vulnerable and the marginalized of our community and whom we should receive, or help, as the image of God that they are .… and while this is certainly true, it constitutes a remarkable change of subject from what Jesus was teaching about just a little bit before that …
So perhaps there is Another message that we can pull from this encounter. The greek world for child used here can Also mean servant … and there are similar connotations in Aramaic … as well as in Hebrew … this word play with the two different words for servant … which could hardly have escaped notice by the original audience … actually helps to emphasize just what kind of servant the disciples were called to be … You see, Some servants in that time were actually quite powerful, acting as stewards of all their master’s wealth and interests … while the child servant is completely … well … powerless.
Remember … worldly power is only important for the wicked because it allows them to get whatever they want, and they confirm this sentiment when they say … “our strength [is] our norm of righteousness; for weakness proves itself useless.” In fact, the wicked will attack weakness just so they can prove the Strength of their power … and it is this inclination to envy and jealousy that, as St James tells us in our second reading, is the cause of “disorder and every foul practice.” Thus the wicked will always attack the just … making persecution an inevitable part of righteous life …
I am not just talking about Physical persecution either … a recent Forbes article detailed four (4) common destructive behaviors in many relationships as: contempt or disrespect, criticism or gossip, defensiveness or blame shifting, stonewalling or tuning out … all of which we can easily find in today’s Culture Wars … some of which I have been guilty of myself; I get upset when people make fun of, or otherwise insult my beliefs or my faith (in that respect, it has been a difficult summer), and I may even lash out in anger sometimes … not to correct, but to harm … not to return a blessing … but to return an evil … however, if I am honest with myself … what did I expect, this is what the wicked do. This is a recurring theme through out all of our Holy Scripture.
But the Christian response to mockery is not performative outrage or self-righteous judgement … it is humility, graciousness and love. Of course, I think that we can all recognize that such as response is not always easy; sometimes we can be too proud or arrogant, somehow feeling like we can make ourselves righteous on our own terms … but if our answer to persecution by the wicked is to likewise attack the wicked, we have failed their test and have fallen into their trap; we have become no better than the wicked themselves.
Fortunately … there Is still hope … We see in today’s Gospel that even the disciples struggled to always behave righteously … and they had the benefit of Our Lord’s physical presence and direct instruction; however, they, like us, were on a journey through the wilderness … a journey where they continued to learn and to grow Toward righteousness … and they, like us, were not content to stand with the wicked when they failed … because we are all made for greater things … however, when we Do fall … we pick ourselves up, we shake off the dust of the world, and we continue to move forward toward the Goal of righteousness … we may not be there yet, but in the mean time, we Are something more than just the wicked … so until we come to the end of our journey, maybe we can actually be … wicked awesome!
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