Power, Rules, and Blessing

AM Psalm 119:145-176 • PM Psalm 128, 129, 130
Exod. 7:8-24 • 2 Cor. 2:14-3:6 • Mark 10:1-16

Once in a while I glance through the day’s readings with dismay. There are words and concepts I don’t like—lots of them: rules, power, judgment, law, compassion-reserved-for-the-righteous, destruction-for-the-rest. I sit here with my dismay for a bit. I prefer a spiritual language less about constriction—and more about beauty and life.

And yet how strange & wonderful it is to read 2500 year-old text written from within a way of life so distant—so unimaginable, really. So here we sit today, hoping to understand what these words must have meant then—so we can understand what they mean now. I wish I could read Hebrew and Greek for myself. I wish I understood the ancient context in more detail.

Author Thomas Cahill (The Gift of the Jews) argues that ancient Sumerian culture was power-based. The Good was whatever benefitted your group over another. If you raided another village, you came home a hero. I try (and mostly fail) to imagine a time when Justice was not really a thing. In that case, principled commandments gifted by a higher, creative power must have settled among these people as an astonishing blessing.

I pause to reflect on our world today and how things, while different, are so much the same. I give thanks that justice and divine law are written on our hearts—in spite of ourselves.

But yes, like everything else, blessings will be hijacked by persistent, evolutionary forces we carry within us. And so in the Gospel reading we see Jesus challenging false piety that pushed away children—and, by proxy, belittled the fragile, lovely human qualities represented by childhood (openness, curiosity, delight, hope…). Jesus understood that divine law blesses and protects these, not controls them.

Thanks be to God.

Written by David Orth

Sculptor with a background in philosophy & kayaking. Moved with wife Sarah and two annoyed cats to Fayetteville in 2020.