July 12, 2009
(Sixth Sunday after Pentecost; Proper 10)
(From The Lectionary Page)
The More Things Change...
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
I have a wonderful book at home entitled, Je Ne Sais What? It’s a collection of French phrases, translated into English, along with a guide to pronunciation. As one who never studied French, I have found the book invaluable when encountering phrases which writers more literate than I throw into their New York Times essays. Without this book, I might never have known, for example, that the phrase, “The more things change the more they stay the same,” is French in origin. ("Plus ca change, plus c'est le meme chose.") And no, I’m not going to try to pronounce it in French. You’d all just laugh. (And with good reason.)
The more things change, the more they stay the same. It has that sort of Gallic world-weariness. You toss off the phrase and punctuate it, perhaps, with a shrug of the shoulders and a sip of a fine old wine. On the surface, it is a phrase that would seem to sum up two of our lessons this morning: our reading from Amos and our gospel from Mark. Amos, as you may know, is the earliest of the prophets whose oracles found their way into sacred Scripture. Amos was a farm worker from the hill country of Judah who, in the 9th century B.C., was sent by God to prophesy to King Jeroboam. Our reading from Amos this morning gives us a taste of what happens to prophets when they do their job, when they tell an inconvenient truth to powerful people who don’t want to hear it: in this case, the wealthy and powerful in Israel who were enjoying a time of economic prosperity and ignoring the demands of the Torah.
In the nine centuries that separate the prophet Amos from the prophet John the Baptizer stood a host of prophets whose names we recognize from Scripture. Again and again, God raised up faithful persons to speak God’s uncomfortable, inconvenient truth to people who did not want to hear it. Nine centuries of kings and priests making bad decisions, nine centuries of warfare with and subsequent conquest by neighboring nations. Nine centuries of kings and priests and scribes failing to live fully into the weighty demands of the Torah that called them to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. Nine centuries of things changing and yet staying the same. So it’s no surprise that when Herod Antipas was Tetrarch of Galilee early in the first century of the Common Era, yet another prophet was called to tread the well-worn path. In this case, John the Baptist. And, as we learn in today’s gospel, yet another prophet is executed in yet another example of what Hannah Arendt once called the banality of evil. Herod makes a foolish vow; his wife triangles her daughter into making a deadly request. A prophet’s life, it seems, is worth less than a king’s honor.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Mark the Evangelist seems aware that his audience could jump to the faulty conclusion that Herod did – assuming that Jesus was simply yet another inconvenient prophet. Certainly the similarities between Jesus and John are considerable. He and his disciples preach repentance of sin, in the manner of John. They travel about Galilee in the manner of John, living a hand-to-mouth existence in the manner of John. Ultimately, Jesus, too, will be executed by the political powers that be, just as John was.
And yet Mark takes considerable pains to show that Jesus is nothing less than the Messiah of God. In his Galilean ministry, in his teachings, and in the miracles he brings about, Jesus proclaims that the kingdom of God has come near – by which we mean, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, God breaks in to human history. He brings healing and restoration, new life from death. Storms are stilled and demons are silenced and people will soon be miraculously fed with a superabundance of food (that’s next week’s gospel) because that is what God desires for God’s people. And so if prophets routinely fail to draw the people back to the Covenant with God, then God will bring the Covenant to human life, God’s love incarnated in the person of Jesus.
There is another way in which Jesus will differ from John the Baptist. As our gospel passage today makes clear, John was a victim of what philosopher Rene Girard terms negative mimesis [see footnote below]. Girard defines this term as the human tendency to covet something desirable – be it wealth, or prestige, or honor; to be frustrated in your attempts to achieve this desirable thing; and to identify, blame, and in some way marginalize an “Other” when your efforts at attaining the desirable thing are thwarted. This scapegoating process doesn’t objectively fix the problem, but it disperses some of the anxiety and creates the illusion that progress is being made toward attaining the desirable thing. Herod & his wife Herodias were caught up in this web of negative mimesis and John the Baptist will take the hit. Eight short chapters later in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus will be crucified in much the same mimetic process. But where John was taken, powerless, from his jail cell and executed; Jesus will not be bereft of power on the cross. He will have the power to do the very thing the crowd will mock him with – to come down from the cross and save himself. The thing is, he will choose not to. And that is something completely unprecedented. In refusing to engage the power of God to wreak vengeance on those who would execute him, Jesus will subvert the power of mimetic violence. He will die to that human sin and take away its power forever.
The more things change the more they stay the same? In the realm of human affairs, the maxim is true. Left to our own devices, we humans tread the well-trodden path of negative mimesis. Across the span of time and culture, we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves even when prophets like Amos or John the Baptist get in our faces and point out the obvious. And yet, in the person of Jesus of Nazareth whom we call Christ, the power of human sin to have the final word is destroyed. This was an utterly new thing that God was doing. In a moment in the vastness of human history, God ensured that our human capacity to do violence to ourselves could be redeemed in the life, death, and resurrection of his Son Jesus.
In brief, Girardian thinking identifies mimetic desire as imitative behavior that not only affects learning but also desire, and imitated desire is a cause of conflict; the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry; the Bible reveals the two previous ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism. Enter Mimetic Theory into your internet search engine to learn more.
