Psalm 1, Proverbs 31.10-31, James 3.13-18, Mark 9.33-37
The Psalmist assumes that all of us are constantly being encouraged to follow the advice of the wicked. The task of the believer is to resist that advice, and instead to follow God’s way.
We might think that it’s easy to resist the advice of the wicked. But just think about advertising, which insidiously encourages us to want new things. We might think, for instance, that we will try not to buy new clothes because manufacturing cloth does a lot of damage to the environment. But then along come the adverts! The wicked are people who encourage us to go against our better judgement, to make unwise and godless choices.
And when they’re not trying to influence us to do the wrong thing, the Psalmist says that the wicked are scoffing at believers for trying to do the right thing. The last US election illustrates what the Psalmist means, although the sharp contrast between the wicked and the believers doesn’t necessarily work in that context.
The Democrats set themselves up as the righteous party, the defenders of democracy and freedom. They claimed that Donald Trump would dismantle democracy if he was elected, and he did tell a conference of Christian supporters that they would never need to vote again if they elected him this time.
In opposition to the Democrats, Donald Trump and his running mate, J D Vance,l set themselves up as the scoffers. You may remember that the original focus of Mr Trump’s campaign was that he was a better alternative than Sleepy Joe Biden and J D Vance said that the Republicans were a better option than ‘a childless cat lady’. Scoffing; was that really the way to go? It won Donald Trump the Presidency, and he's now using digitally altered photos of Democrat politicians wearing sombreros to poke fun at them in a new way, but ultimately only time will tell if this will work again.
In the Bible trees are symbols of sustainability. They live for a long time, they don’t take much looking after and they produce much fruit. That’s the mark of true prosperity and that’s what the Psalmist thinks the believer should be aiming for - leaving a light footprint on God’s Earth.
By contrast, the wicked are like chaff. In modern times farmers have collected the chaff and used it. My grandfather used to keep it in big chaff bins and used it as animal feed, but before the invention of threshing machines and combine harvesters the only way to separate the grain from its chaff was to beat the grain on a threshing floor and let the chaff blow away in the wind. That’s how sustainable the lifestyle of the wicked will be - totally ephemeral and wasteful, here today and gone tomorrow. Their way will perish.
So that brings the Psalmist to his definition of prosperity. It isn’t what the wicked imagine - accumulating things or worldly wealth. True prosperity comes from living in God’s way.
Not surprisingly, Proverbs 31.10-31 has become a battleground between feminist theologians and traditionalists - people who want to get back to a supposedly Biblical model of femininity, where the woman tries to be a dutiful housewife and obey her husband. The traditionalists celebrate this passage, the feminists tend to denigrate it as an out-moded model of femininity.
What we have to concede, straightaway, is that this passage was probably composed by a man, so it’s a male perspective on what an ideal woman would look like if she existed. But what feminists sometimes overlook is that in the Old testament Wisdom literature women are usually identified with God’s wisdom. In other words, what the writer might be saying is that the ideal helpmate for any man is not some impossible perfect human wife but God’s wisdom.
The other thing to note is that - whether or not she is a model for a perfect wife and mother - this woman is not the stereotype of the submissive wife that traditionalists imagine. She’s a business woman, a provider, a manager, she’s strong and compassionate, kind and wise. She isn’t defined by her looks or her charm, and she doesn’t depend on her husband for her social status. Instead, her husband gets some of his social status from being with her. In other words, they are at least equal partners, and the more perfect she is the more significant her part in their relationship becomes.
If we reimagine the passage as a hymn to Wisdom, the husband can trust her because she shows him God’s way to live, and by trusting her he will find the real prosperity which the Psalmist spoke about. God’s Wisdom inspires us all - men and women alike - to be productive and creative, strong yet compassionate and kind.
I hope by now that you can see a theme emerging from these Bible passages. In James 3.13-18 the writer contrasts wisdom with selfish ambition. There are plenty of people who are generally considered to be astute, artful, shrewd and sophisticated but who can only climb up the greasy pole of success by treading on the fingers of the people behind them. Their driving force is self-interest and a desire to do better than other successful people. They imagine that they deserve prosperity more than their rivals.
That, says the writer of James, is not God’s way. People who climb to the top in that single-minded way are sometimes lucky but, if their luck turns for the worse, they will meet again the people they trampled while they were rising, only this time they will meet them on their way down.
God's way, the way to a secure and sustainable form of prosperity, is inspired instead by pure wisdom, a sort of knowledge which is grounded in being peaceable, gentle, merciful, gracious, impartial and full of integrity. If, by any chance, these people meet with adversity, they will meet colleagues on their way down whom they treated with kindness and thoughtfulness on their way up.
These are the people who leave behind them a good impression, rather than bitterness or envy. Their harvest, says the writer, is righteousness.
In Mark 9.33-37 the disciples are continuing the argument addressed by the Psalmist, by the writers of the Wisdom literature and by James. How do you measure real greatness? The disciples want to know which of them Jesus considers to be the greatest of all, but they dare not ask him.
Perhaps Jesus overhears them. Perhaps their silence gives them away. To explain his vision, Jesus uses a living example, a little child whom he puts in the middle of the room in his house, presumably with the disciples gathered round them.
In the Roman Empire fathers had the power of life and death over their children. If they chastised one of their children and the child died, it wasn’t treated as murder. But, as far as we know, Jewish attitudes at the time of Jesus were more enlightened. The Old Testament certainly celebrates the place of children in society and says they’re a gift from God. Although it was probably an idealised picture of how things actually were, children enjoyed certain rights in the Old Testament - the right to food, shelter and compassion. On the other hand, plenty of children were slaves. What we can say for certain though is that children were subordinate to adults. As my grandmother was fond of saying, they were expected to be seen and not heard.
Jesus says that being humble, and totally without over-reaching ambition, is a virtue. It brings us closer to God. Notice that he doesn’t say we should behave like little children, only that the situation little children find themselves in is not to be despised, because God chooses to identify with those who are vulnerable and voiceless.
It’s easy for us to say, ‘Of course we must try to be childlike.’ We have heard this story many times before and we live in a culture which values children highly, or at least claims that it does. However, consider this: which would we rather choose - a life where we got to do many kind and wonderful things, but these never got noticed by anyone and we never received any credit for them, or a life where we got to do many more ambitious, self-centred things and received lots of recognition and rewards for them? How we truthfully answer that question defines how wise we are, how close we have come to God’s way.
The Chinese philosopher Lao Tsu described true greatness like this, and I think Jesus would have agreed with him. ‘To lead people,’ he said, ‘Walk beside them... As for the best leaders, the people do not even notice their existence; the next best, the people honour and praise them; the next best, the people fear them; and the worst kind, the people hate them... When the best leader’s work is done the people will say, ‘We did it ourselves!’
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